If the service is free, you are the product. Why expect any level of privacy from a free to use app? Bonkers.
WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
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Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#92To be honest I feel a bit disenfranchised. I’ve used all my energy to convert all my friends to signal when the WhatsApp privacy policy fiasco happened and now they’re saying it was a waste of time since they don’t want anything to do with bitcoins.. I can’t blame them as I also don’t want this on my messaging app. I feel like I will just give up and use WhatsApp and assume that I only had privacy pre-internet.
What in the world? They don’t have to use it. This has to be one of the worst arguments I’ve ever seen. Did your friends throw their iPhones in the trash when ApplePay came about?
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It maybe a bad argument but it's a practical view. Governments around the world (see: India, China) have strict laws around crypto. By law of association, any service that remotely mentions this is severely scrutinized. I can hardly blame my friends if they want no part of this.
They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.
> They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.
Contrived strawman rebuttal: Government sees app "ThingX" now deals with crypto. ThingX indicates that different variants of the app can interact with crypto depending on the region. Government doesn't care because they're not tech savvy, bans ThingX because crypto.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they don’t want anything to do with bitcoins Honestly, this is a bad argument. You can use Signal and never send a gif or stickers. You don't have to do anything with ~~stickers~~crypto when using Signal. It is an opt-in feature that is probably going to not be used my 90% of people. This is just a bad argument surrounding the whole ordeal. Now the arguments about: regulations, Moxie's involvement (stated he has no…
Well, their opinion could be that Bitcoin is extremely wasteful and damaging to our environment for very little value, and so they do not want to support any organization that supports Bitcoin. A boycott, if you will. I’m not arguing that position but I’m just saying that if that is the case, then their boycott is more reasonable than say a “stickers” boycott.
They should educate themselves on why bitcoin is useful and why it's not wasteful, rather than ignore it based on false assumptions.
This series of short articles is very good for those who want to learn the fundamentals: https://tomerstrolight.medium.com/why-bitcoin-the-series-660...
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#95That big privacy policy update everyone was complaining about was--again--only about providing hosted e2e clients in the cloud for Facebook Business customers, and had nothing to do with end user to end user chats: the goal was to solve the experience problem of a company wanting to provide a chatbot and realizing "omg, I have to host all of the chat client parts myself and build some way for random people in my orga…
People are mad about whatsapp because it used to be a good platform that they now feel compelled to abandon. I don't think people have any particular allegiance to fb messenger—it exists and is something to be tolerated. the whole "but the privacy policy changes weren't that bad!!!" to which I say: it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. People didn't want their metadata harvestsed by FB, and this was a…
The problem is that the protests are not framed this way. Not "WA was going downhill for years, and now my patience ran out", but "Ouch, this particular change in ToS is a game-changer, all is lost, I'm quitting!!"
This undermines trust to the argument. It looks more like it aims for a knee-jerk reaction, all emotion, zero thought. If you don a large enough tinfoil hat, you can even imagine for a second that somebody is trying to scare away more users from the largest e2ee platform out there, so that they would land on less secure platforms — but of course I'm no RMS to suggest such outlandish things.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#96My personal experience is that I moved some friends to Telegram and kept family in WhatsApp.The time using the phone decreased, I found having 2 messengers more beneficial as I will switch only when there is some relevant conversation or topic happening.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#97In Jan, there was a big outcry, i thought all would move to signal. I have about 25% of the conversations in signal, but especially for groups, whatsapp is so sticky, that they seem to have broadly failed in signal, and are back to whatsapp. I continue to have individual conversations on signal with most friends, but the idea of being able to leave whatsapp seems to be much tougher than I thought.
Not sure for you, but what makes WhatsApp the stickiest for me out of the chat apps is the statuses (stories). I start many of my conversations on WA by seeing someone's status (story). On Signal, Telegram, or even iMessage, there isn't that nudge to restart the conversation.
I think if those platforms made some story-like feature, I'd have an easier time leaving WhatsApp.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It maybe a bad argument but it's a practical view. Governments around the world (see: India, China) have strict laws around crypto. By law of association, any service that remotely mentions this is severely scrutinized. I can hardly blame my friends if they want no part of this.
Crypto is so strange. You claim ownership over a string of 1s and 0s. Exclusive rights.
Most of my finances are just strings of 1s and 0s. My company pays me. They don't send pieces of paper to my bank. It happens via 1s and 0s. From there, 80-90% of my expenses get paid automatically (rent, most taxes, electricity, internet, gas, water, trash collection) all via 1s and 0s. And cash is slowly disappearing into 1s and 0s as well via phone payment systems.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#99Why is Wire never mentioned in these discussions on HN, is there something I'm missing? Seems like the most secure option to me: https://wire.com/en/security/
While they use the Signal protocol for encryption, they do leave more metadata on the server. For example your recently contacted contacts and all your groups.
Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
#100Why is it so hard for someone to make a simple WhatsApp competitor with the same business model as the pre-facebook WhatsApp? It was build by just a few people 10 freakin years ago. I wish people valued their privacy higher than $1 a year but I guess many don't.
Because pre-facebook WhatsApp wasn't that great. It was frequently down and didn't even use TLS.
However Threema exists. It is paid up front and otherwise fairly boring: https://threema.ch/en