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Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

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481–490 of 560 posts

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#481
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was around for a lot of these. In none of these cases did Meta lie. They are all either fake or honest mistakes that Meta never lied about. For the second one in particular, Meta never listened to anyone's mic. I would know, I worked on this stuff there at that time.

Interesting, you say Facebook didn’t listen to anyone’s audio, yet they themselves admit their contractors routinely did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-... They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-... And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything? So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just…

Actually not even that. What happened was we added a mechanism to preload the camera to reduce startup time. And it was not gathering any data

You're confusing the audio calls with secretly listening to microphone, which never happened

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We dont care about Iran having a nuke any more than we care about Pakistan's or N. Korea. N. Korea has said mean things to us too. The only thing we care about is Iran's resources and support for the Palestinians.

> only thing we care about is Iran's resources and support for the Palestinians What’s with the Palestinian distortion effect? We sanctioned Iran’s oil. And to the degree we consider the Palestinians, it’s in mostly ignoring their interests. (But still caring to learn about them more than the North Koreans’ or Pakistanis’.) The difference is Pyongyang has behaved rationally. It doesn’t sponsor terror groups across th…

If (Russian ally) Delhi tried a decapitating strike on (US ally, ruled by US patsies) Pakistan we'd loose our shit.

Pray, when has Iran behaved irrationally? Except when trusting us, which Kissinger pointed out is really dumb.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#483
post #472
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ayatollah" is more like "Bishop" in this analogy. Bishop of Rome doesn't like AI, news reports this, nothing changes.

To be frank, you are ignorant on the topic and should do more research. This isn't the Catholic Church; he is the supreme leader of Iran and the commander in chief of their military. What he says goes.

The Bishop of Rome is more commonly (but technically incorrectly) known as "the Pope".

There are thousands of Ayatollah, you mean specifically the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Catholic Church used to be powerful, but it too has had mismatches between even ex cathedra teachings and what people actually do: see also US politics having occasional arguments about if being Catholic disqualified someone from politics because they submitted to the Bishop of Rome over the people.

And that's without the way government leaders often tell bold faced lies (and less obvious lies, too).

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that Israel is trying to help the Iranian people is a falsehood. Israel is bombing residential neighborhoods. This is cynicism on the part of the Israeli government, something we should be well aware of now as they are completing the final stages of the genocide in Gaza.

Fog of war is thick right now. There is plenty of reason for iran to overstate this (to e.g. try and get a rally around the flag affect to increase regime stability). [Otoh, plenty of reason for Israel to understate. Truth is the first casualty of war] We'll probably have to wait for the dust to settle before we have a good idea what was or wasn't bombed.

International news organizations reporting on this conflict incorporate accounts of residents and human rights organizations. It’s simply not true that the Iranian and Israeli governments are our only source of facts on this matter, or that the reports of attacks on residential areas are the result of “fog of war”.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can be forced to use these apps. If you don't want, they will find some other way, I personally only respond to email.

Then you’ll be excluded from a lot of groups and social activities without even knowing. That might be an acceptable trade off for you but it's a trade off nonetheless.

I'm not in high school to be afraid of being "excluded" from some social activities.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also about sending a message to the population (no pun intended), about uniting them against a common enemy. Dictators want people to believe that their enemy is also the enemy of the people.

The idea that Israel is trying to help the Iranian people is a falsehood. Israel is bombing residential neighborhoods. This is cynicism on the part of the Israeli government, something we should be well aware of now as they are completing the final stages of the genocide in Gaza.

Israel wants nothing more than for Iran to be free of the IRGC.

Unlike Israel's Arab neighbors, Iran didn't attempt to destroy Israel (and kill all the Jews) in 1948. Before the IRGC took over, Iran and Israel had no problems.

The IRGC has made it clear that destroying Israel is one of their primary foreign policy objectives. They have said this, and it's why they funded Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#488
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don’t use any alternatives. I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words. even if one says “well that’s crazy, I must get my dopamine through an “app” on my phone meta is on another level of insanity to even consider infesting your life and especially your loved one’s life

Sure, I can also avoid putting chemicals on my body by washing my hair with apple cider vinegar and baking soda, and I can also churn my own butter by hand, and if mom wants to hear from me, she can cross an international border and drive for five hours, with her travels being logged by countless security and traffic cameras, gas station payment processors, and no less than two governments, so that she can converse w…

Can confim: baking soda and vinagur work great for hair washing.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a lie. I personally know somebody who worked at meta and they had a whole set of teams dedicated to building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries Now I don't know the exact details of which governments had which access (was it just for warrants, which nations, what was the line between actual terrorist versus persecuting journalists), but there was absolutely bulk export and t…

> building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries While I can totally imagine that governments would mass-export data, and I don’t doubt your friends claim, I can also imagine more innocent interpretation of this work. I once worked on a large company’s GDPR data-export project. It was a large enough company that it also had a dedicated team to handle legal requests regularly from government…

Yes, I can imagine a benign use of this technology, but past behavior and the PR dishonesty have given me no reason to prefer the most benign interpretation over the most profitable interpretation.

If however they said something more authentic like "We export data in all these cases, in all these countries, and it's never more than .01% of users in a given country, and it never includes freedom-of-speech crimes, and ..." or something then maybe I'd be inclined to consider that.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that Israel is trying to help the Iranian people is a falsehood. Israel is bombing residential neighborhoods. This is cynicism on the part of the Israeli government, something we should be well aware of now as they are completing the final stages of the genocide in Gaza.

Israel wants nothing more than for Iran to be free of the IRGC. Unlike Israel's Arab neighbors, Iran didn't attempt to destroy Israel (and kill all the Jews) in 1948. Before the IRGC took over, Iran and Israel had no problems. The IRGC has made it clear that destroying Israel is one of their primary foreign policy objectives. They have said this, and it's why they funded Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Israel wants a regime change, that is clear. However it’s absurd to suggest the Israeli government has benevolent intentions toward the Iranian people considering that it is bombing people living in residential areas (never mind the Israeli defense minister’s comments that the Tehran residents will pay for Iran’s counterattack on Israel).
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