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WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

androidpolice.com

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Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#171

Post by busymom0 »

dalbasal wrote: post #32
jonplackett wrote: post #12

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.

>> a simple WhatsApp competitor with the same business model as the pre-facebook WhatsApp. Because the business was "sell to fb," effectively. Whoever succeeds in putting together a wide network of people will face similar incentives. I suppose someone could do it Craig Newmark style, but for that a Craig Newmark needs to be CEO of a major app company. Long odds.

Was that the business model before FB offered them the deal though? If I remember right, before then, they has a $1 per year subscription?

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#172

Post by scrollaway »

themacguffinman wrote: post #167
scrollaway wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp built its userbase over several years. It did so at a time where it had a clear value prop, replacing sms which cost a lot with something nearly free. It grew in popularity in eastern european countries, spread later in europe and then later in the US when Facebook acquired them. This was a process, not a 1-day switch from skype to whatsapp. The network effects are real, and if you don't understand how diffi…

The network effects were real for SMS too, yet users still moved to WhatsApp because it was free (much to the chagrin of incumbent carriers), that's what users wanted . Of course it's difficult to get people to join a chat app, and it should be. At a minimum you should need to provide something that users want and didn't have before. WhatsApp offered something new, it was an effective price tag of zero with phone num…

Signal offers nothing new to users right now. "Privacy" is too abstract. E2EE? The few users who know what that is tend to know that Whatsapp already has it. In fact, those shitty crypto payments might be the only thing Signal does offer to users. But you also lose out on chat syncing for example.

Surprisingly though, Signal is gaining a bit of traction, so I think "Privacy" is still something people do want. But it has to be better defined.

And to be completely honest I don't believe in Signal. The current messenger wars kind of feel like a parallel universe's email wars "yahoo vs gmail vs hotmail vs live" or something. Coming up with a new messenger is easy. Most of them have the same featuresets. The underlying protocols should be compatible instead of this sorry state of affairs.

Matrix will probably win out in the end but it's going to be long-drawn and unnecessarily annoying for users in the mean time. It shouldn't matter if you're using instagram's UI, or messenger's, or signal's, …. You should get access to the contacts you want, and be able to cross-talk.

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#173

Post by romanovcode »

godelski wrote: post #34
nopato wrote: post #13

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.

> 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…

> Honestly, this is a bad argument.

No, it is a very good argument. Those who are using computers since pre-mobile era (which is everyone but zoomers) remember very well how simple programs slowly became more bloated and then basically became adware. This is what it is associated to.

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#174

Post by jeltz »

pmlnr wrote: post #155
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If there were to fix the bloody video call orientation before dwelling into shitcoins I might agree.

That will not make Moxie rich so why would he focus on that?

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#175

Post by lorenzhs »

LordAtlas wrote: post #70
foolinaround wrote: post #2

In 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.

The Signal UX for groups is truly terrible. It looks like a rainbow puked in there. And heaven help you if you use their crappy desktop client. It doesn't sync with your mobile client unless you open the app on your phone, and then syncs everything slowly, which messes up your group chats if you happen to send another message in between.

When is the last time you used it? Because I have none of these issues. None. Especially since "It doesn't sync with your mobile client unless you open the app on your phone" is architecturally completely wrong. The desktop client doesn't communicate through your phone. That's how WhatsApp web works, but Signal Desktop doesn't.

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#176

Post by user-the-name »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #164
noja wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trust only works in retrospect Nonsense. Trust provides a basis for present and future dealings.

please get in touch by email, I have a business proposal for you. I highly recommend Robert Cialdini before making opinionated comments on trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...

No, because, and this is very crucial:

I don't trust you.

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#177

Post by _flux »

busymom0 wrote: post #169
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the design of Element? I don't think it's anymore complicated than e-mail and even my grandpa has one of those

Design isn't the biggest issue of Element imo. The speed it. It's super slow. I used another matrix app (can't remember the name now) and that also had the same issue. And the speed wasn't the app issue I think as everything else worked fine but loading messages and sending them took forever. Has this improved recently?

It sounds most likely the issue wasn't with the client, but with the server. The most popular server matrix.org is dealing with a lot of clients, but its performance has been improved, well, "recently", by improvements to the most popular homeserver Synapse.

The next step plan is to move to Dendrite, which is a new homeserver taking the lessons learned from writing Synapse, as well as being implemented in Go instead of Python. But it doesn't yet do everything. You can try a dendrite-hosted server by using dendrite.matrix.org as your homeserver. (AFAIK it has its own accounts.)

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#178

Post by hackerfromthefu »

Sunspark wrote: post #73
godelski wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talk to my friends, parents, and family about it a lot. They don't understand it, but they do care. Problem is that they don't understand how to fight back. They do not want to give up on Facebook. They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there." So I think they care, but there's a big sense of helplessness. Honestly that's why I like projects like Signal. There's no way I can get…

It's interesting how people turn into such app misers when it comes to messengers. It's upsetting to have multiple different ones, even though they don't eat up disk space. Some are very loyal to the Zuckerberg offerings. They ride or die with the Zuckster.

It's because each app is stealing your data on your phone - personal life, financial things going across your phone.

Most of them have been busted, multiple times.

It comes down to risk exposure, gotta make a deal with one devil, but you don't want a dozen bad actors ganging up on your data.

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#179

Post by f1refly »

antihero wrote: post #149
inputmice wrote: post #110

Quicksy.im / Conversations.im developer here. I promise I’ll never implement crypto currency into my messenger apps.¹ Even if I break my promise you could just use a fork of my app since XMPP servers don’t prevent third party clients from connecting. ¹: I don’t have to either because I have a working business model that’s not a ponzi scheme

Is there a way to sign up to it which is as simple for tech-illiterate people as WhatsApp/Signal? I recall the last few times I, a developer, have tried to functionally use any sort of XMPP based thing it has been a confusing and inconsistent experience.

That's exactly what quicksy.im is for, it's a build flavor of conversations that uses the users phone number as jabber id with auto discovery

Re: WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal

#180

Post by ptman »

29083011397778 wrote: post #85
minot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might say that well I’m no worse off than before which is true but still feels weird that I was unable to use my existing riot im account when I wanted to sign into Mozilla’s riot server. I ended up creating a different login for Mozilla’s riot. I think of myself as a technophile but element/matrix/riot made me eat the humble pie.

Is it possible you were trying to login without the full path? You're email isn't minot, it's minot@hckrnews.com. Similarly, on Matrix, your username isn't minot, but minot@matrix.org. Trying to sign in with your provider can be non-obvious, and would also cause the issue it sounds like you were having :)

Small correction. The syntax for MXIDs is @minot:matrix.org, not minot@matrix.org in order to prevent people from mixing it with emails.
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