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WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

arstechnica.com

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Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#291

Post by suyash »

reimertz wrote: post #287

We need to kill the idea that user growth is a replacement for a honest and legit business model. This is not just a founders problem - investors are equally compliant since they keep on throwing their money as long as they see that sweet exponential curve. Once they get tired of seeing their money being lit on fire; they give the founders one option; monetize what you have or shut down. Since users are now used to y…

Yes the problem is 'adverstiting based business model' when companies seem to offer 'free services' when in reality they always plan to harvest and sell private data to advertisers. This is what is happening now with WhatsApp and FB so I'm not shocked, it was about time.

What we need more urgently is better open source alternatives that allow us to port out of this wall garden apps easily, that is only way I can see my contacts and data from WhatsApp and other apps migrating out.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#292

Post by Swaglord333 »

What would the smart alternative to WA be? Telegram? Line? How can I continue using the WA without giving Facebook sth to work with?

Please bear with me if this doesn't belong here. Normally I wouldn't dare posting on HN (don't want it to become mainstream and have idiots like me gush out their opinions) but I really dunno who else to ask this.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#294

Post by codemac »

frereubu wrote: post #22

I'd love to give up WhatsApp, but network effects are key here. I tried moving my extended family off WhatsApp onto Signal a couple of years ago and it failed miserably because the app wasn't nearly as easy to use, and they had all their friends on Whatsapp. Has anyone here had any success moving a large group of people onto something like Signal or Telegram? If so, do you have any tips?

Signal - moved my immediate family to it, and now have a few friends on there as well.

It had some rockiness maybe about 3 years ago, but with their new group implementation and some other small tweaks I find it just as easy to use as whatsapp, albeit it a little uglier.

#1 complaint is the coloring - incoming messages should be high contrast, outgoing should have the background color. For some reason signal does the opposite and it's hideous.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#295

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

kleiba wrote: post #196
seesawtron wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social life is impossible without the mainstream technology. Sure you can find alternatives but if no one uses it other than you, you end up being sidelined. The technology gets enforced and leaves one with no choice but to accept it or be a red flag. Shouldn't it be possible to delete your whatsapp chat and contacts data regularly from the cloud? Eg. one could delete the whatsapp account, clear data on cloud and mak…

Social life is impossible without the mainstream technology. I've never owned a cell phone nor ever had a social media account in my life. Sure, it gets me the occasional eye roll but trust me, my social life is just fine. Caveat: old person speaking.

I have never had a social media account (younger person here) and it has gotten me many eye rolls too, but I've never cared. However, whatsapp is different, everyone always treated it like internet texting where I'm from. I call my friends when I want to hear them and properly talk to them, but many things such as planning trips and talking about things that interest all of us are just way better done over some sort of text medium over longer periods of time.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#296

Post by wruza »

judge2020 wrote: post #87
nickcw wrote: post #74

How about pay $1 / year to opt out of all data sharing? I foolishly installed the Facebook app on Android for a while. When I asked for a data dump from Facebook I was amazed at the amount of data it had stolen from my phone, including full contacts list. It sounds like that is exactly what Facebook are planning with WhatsApp. I'd pay $1 / year to opt out of that and be the customer rather than the product.

$1 a year is super low. YouTube values their ads at approximately $12 a month[0] - FB can’t be much less. (E: 12, not 18. 18 is for families) 0: https://YouTube.com/premium

Few years ago we discussed these numbers on a pretty popular (top 5 of its kind) local pic-and-discussion forum. Devs said that an average user brings around $2 in a year (including those using adblock, etc). I sent them around $8 and they turned off any ads for my account forever. I could just continue using ad blocking, but they made that “hey you’re using” header that annoyed me on mobile, where it is hard to “pick an element”. Of course their income/user ratio is not comparable to youtube’s one, but they meet their ends well, and also have much much lower megabytes/user ratio. In infra costs they may be even more profitable per user than youtube (just a blind guess).

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#297

Post by m-chrzan »

nkingsy wrote: post #110
Evidlo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just moving from one silo to another though. Users of centralized services don't have much recourse when the company pulls the rug out from under them.

Isn’t the problem profit motive? Wikipedia is a foundation, so it works the same way it always has. We need this for more basic services like messaging and identity

I've always thought the solution should be an open federated IM standard, like email but for conversations rather than correspondence. If that were the widely adopted solution, you'd end up with large free providers that work perfectly fine for most regular users (like gmail), paid services that fully respect your privacy, and the more technical folks would be free to host their own servers.

I guess Matrix is doing this, but unfortunately, the way history has played out, centralized IM had first mover advantage by a huge margin and that's what people are used to now - that a messenger is an application on your phone that you can only use to contact other users of that same application.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#298

Post by Normal_gaussian »

Zelphyr wrote: post #285

It has been said that companies that build rely too heavily on the public, free API’s of another service are doomed when that service decides to monetize those API’s. See, for example, API users of Google Maps. I think we are now at the point where this applies to individuals. If a person or group of people rely too heavily on a single free service then they’re going to feel pain when that service finally decides to…

Its worth remembering that whatsapp used to have an annual charge, and it grew successfully with that. The charge was only removed once FB bought them.

Personally I don't know anyone that started using whatsapp after the fb purchase, so they were all happy to pay for their use of a messaging app.

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#299

Post by chrisballinger »

Swaglord333 wrote: post #292

What would the smart alternative to WA be? Telegram? Line? How can I continue using the WA without giving Facebook sth to work with? Please bear with me if this doesn't belong here. Normally I wouldn't dare posting on HN (don't want it to become mainstream and have idiots like me gush out their opinions) but I really dunno who else to ask this.

Signal: https://signal.org/

Re: WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

#300

Post by codemac »

dijit wrote: post #46
frereubu wrote: post #22

I'd love to give up WhatsApp, but network effects are key here. I tried moving my extended family off WhatsApp onto Signal a couple of years ago and it failed miserably because the app wasn't nearly as easy to use, and they had all their friends on Whatsapp. Has anyone here had any success moving a large group of people onto something like Signal or Telegram? If so, do you have any tips?

I contact the majority of my friends with telegram, the UX is similar enough and people get on board quite quickly- the difficult part is convincing someone to install /another/ messaging app- if they have network effects too then it's a hard sell. But once most people have both it gets easier. Signal (UX wise) is not really super great for my family, I burned a lot of my "technical expert advisor" capital and reputa…

Signal has improved a lot. I burnt a lot of the same thing, but it's finally sticking when I ask people to first install it within the last year or so.
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