151–160 of 244 posts
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Only if you trust Facebook to implement E2E encryption well in their proprietary code.
> I'm sorry, but that's not how computer software works. Anyone who knows what a basic block is can straightforwardly verify the claims WhatsApp is making. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11432096
Why 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.
That was Signal - he took the Facebook money and made Signal with it.
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> They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there." I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to stop short of asking people to switch, and just try to get them to install it (and maybe even get them to casually suggest their friends do the same, if the opportunity arises). It's a hopefully small, risk-free step to take, and the more people that have installs, the more likely…
I work in tech and I don't know a single person on Signal. It was already hard enough to get my family to start using WhatsApp over the years, and I still get messages from some of them over Skype(!!!!) for some reason. Frankly, I have no strength for yet another switch, I'm staying with WhatsApp for the time being.
Pidgin with a shitton of plugins. If the only problem is the migration, that still works as a single client, albeit with drawbacks and hiccups. (I collected them at https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins and yes, it'll need to be compiled, even Pidgin itself for some of the solutions. There's nothing user friendly about it, sadly.)
On the other hand... the only system I never had to migrate off is IRC. The funny bit of IRC is that it's not private in terms of security at all, but because it's anonymus, it still feels like it.
And so I keep thinking about needs when it comes to privacy: what do I really need in the context of internet communication? Anonymity, privacy, or both?
I don't have a definitive answer.
To 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?
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> They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there." I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to stop short of asking people to switch, and just try to get them to install it (and maybe even get them to casually suggest their friends do the same, if the opportunity arises). It's a hopefully small, risk-free step to take, and the more people that have installs, the more likely…
I work in tech and I don't know a single person on Signal. It was already hard enough to get my family to start using WhatsApp over the years, and I still get messages from some of them over Skype(!!!!) for some reason. Frankly, I have no strength for yet another switch, I'm staying with WhatsApp for the time being.
Like many people, I'd definitely prefer having just one messenger, but now I simply use Signal with everyone that's on it and only have to open WhatsApp a few times a week. This entire thing has to be seen as a process IMO.
I think this is bad. But also a general tendency: Accumulations of data are valuable to companies which exploit them. Larger accumulations of data are even more valuable, in a non-linear way. This is because data sets are multi-dimensional, and the more dimensions you have, the more information you can get out of it, even if the users initially have never thought about that. So, if you have two large accumulations of data, and you join them, you get extra value.
Google is doing this aggregation as well, as mentioned in its terms of service.
You also see that in they way Microsoft is trying to link business and personal accounts via Lynx and so on. You also see that with platforms like LinkedIn (which was bought by Microsoft).
In other words, it works a bit like gravity. Mass attracts other masses and more mass attracts even more mass. And what we will end up is a kind of black hole in which everything is collapsing into the same place.
Without effective regulation, one day, Facebook's data and Google's data will probably be combined.
BTW I am also skeptic whether some of the reported "data leaks" are not in reality covered-up data sales. As long as there are no substantial consequences, like criminal sentences, to people who do that, there are very few barriers to exploiting personal data in this way.
How can it be illegal? It is their platform, their own rules, right? If you don't like it, then just don't use it. There are other platforms which are more than good enough. /s if not obv, I'm making fun of people defending the App Store, yet when FB is in question are blatantly showing their hypocrisy.
Just delete Facebook. They can’t aggregate data between WhatsApp and Facebook if there is no Facebook data to aggregate!
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Their reasons are completely valid honestly. There's nothing that feels like you have no power than using a chat app with none of your friends on it. Only way to really take power back is make an app better than what's on the market, and have it respect your privacy. A very, very tall order, but I think it's the only way we can really take power away from big tech and give it back to the people.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not trying to say that their concerns are invalid. They very much are valid. I don't think you can win by just having a better app. Marketing plays a big role. So something like Signal is going to be a major underdog because OSS and freeware don't have the same cashflow to do marketing. What I'm trying to say is that we need to be that marketing. Talking about data and privacy _is_…
- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters - opening Signal displays empty frame far too long - it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls - forwarding message from chat to chat is not working - messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.
And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.