I'm so disappointed in this. Whatsapp is a functional tool. It was successful since it worked.
Facebook has entirely failed to utilise it - to allow external systems to connect in so that businesses can do business on there. The voice calls are also a disaster.
They've now come along to start messing with the privacy to start selling ads. It is insane that they're able to make such a mess of this. Is there a word for anti-innovation?
Considering that they're linking Facebook ad platform with the chats, and they're forcing this upon everyone, why isn't this covered by the monopoly laws? Most of us paid some money for the app.
> Facebook has entirely failed to utilise it - to allow external systems to connect in so that businesses can do business on there.
They weren’t allowed to do that under old TOS, and the whole point of this update is to allow data sharing when contacting businesses, that will allow building business tools.
It brings more functionality like Messenger to interface with businesses - which I have found value in. For instance United service there was quicker and better than using the phone line to change/re-book flights.
I understand the objective on making (more) money.
Why have 1bn users and make $1 per user? Isn't it better if then have 200mn users and make $20 per user?
For me this 'shedding freeloaders and privacy-oriented-users' helps them more than not.
We have discussed pricing and volumes of customers before in this forum, multiple times, and for multiple products/services.
Is it better to have 1000 users and make $1 from each ($1000), or it is better to have 100 users and make $50 from each ($5000 and less support/maintenance/infrastructure costs)?
Facebook's obligation is to the shareholders. Shareholders want bigger pie. Shareholders will get a bigger pie. Apparently FB didn't lose enough users to be scared. Reality/facts drive this.
In a related note, I installed Viber. It asked me to share data with advertisers. I tapped to see the list. I scrolled (on my android phone) VERY fast, for 22 seconds to go through it.
The niche that Whatsapp filled and which brought it to massive adoption was not the same as Skype's. In South America (and Asia, too, if I understand correctly), Whatsapp was a way to avoid SMS charges on your mobile phone. Because now it is the only way many acquaintances and businesses can be contacted, it will remain entrenched even with this hostile new privacy policy.
Skype, on the other hand, was about audio- or videoconferencing from a computer, and so it wasn’t quite as much a part of the ordinary person's life as Whatsapp.
> Whatsapp is a functional tool. It was successful since it worked.
No! Whatsapp is a service!
Lots of people have been warning you that this is what happens when you get tools and services confused. I had warned people on here about this exact thing happening years ago when everyone thought it was the new hotness. People on this board were telling me I'm being overly cautious but this happens almost every time. Stop tying your identity and data to services if you're not 100% ok with them completely screwing you over!
Jabber has OMEMO and we have deltachat and autocrypt for email now. There is no reason to ever do this!
>Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition.
>The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.
When FB bought WhatsApp and Instagram they made explicit promises to regulators not to do this in order to get permission.
To make things even worse. Zuck wrote in email “It is better to buy than compete,” after buying Instagram.
People aren’t going to pay for simple services like WhatsApp in 2021. It’s as simple as that.
Tech people with a high degree of suspicion and high disposable income are the exception. Even within that group, most people won’t put their money where their mouth is when given the option.
"... the average price people are willing to pay to get access to whatsapp [because the value Facebook provides with its growing networks of sites still isn't adequate enough because Facebook isn't actually an innovative company; and people don't trust or like Facebook enough to pay for the value that privacy, trust, and genuine support would allow for]"
I agree with you completely, but “Most of us paid some money for the app”: I didn’t know it was possible to pay for WhatsApp. On what platforms does it cost money?
On iPhone it was $1, since it was easy to take the money. On Android, where most users didn’t have payment setup, it was free with the promise to eventually charge $1 in the future, which they never did. Then Facebook bought them for $19B.
The app on Android has always been free. Sometimes it asked 1 Euro to keep working. I always ignored it. I should also have had to setup payment on Google Play as I never bought an app or anything there. I remember that it stopped working for a few days at least once but Whatsapp was not as important as it is now. I waited and it welcomed me back again. Did I see their bluff?
If they'd start asking for money now there will be a mass migration to any other free service. We did it many times with instant messengers on PCs in the 90s and the early 2000s. People ponders about $10 vs $9 but they take no time moving from $1 to free.
I started getting messages from Indeed on Whatsapp that I never signed up for. It was tolerable tbh (I'm looking for work) even though their results were shit.
One day they spammed like 20 messages in a row, so I blocked them. If blocking was not allowed, I would just uninstall Whatsapp.
>They've now come along to start messing with the privacy to start selling ads
Selling user data and advertising is pretty much the end goal of most "free" applications that suddenly pop up on the scene, and that end goal is set from the start (whether to monetize the app yourself or sell/get acquired by a company that will monetize it).
It’s so bad that I can’t understand why LINE is only popular in Asia. It has all the good parts of WhatsApp plus a bunch of silly goodies like stickers, open groups, mobile payments, etc. Businesses have “official” accounts that can be
operated by employees as well as bot interactions.
Whatsapp voice calls are pretty much the only way I can communicate with foreign family. Actually even locally, sometimes whatsapp calls are much better over wifi than cell calls over towers, it's kind of ridiculous. I don't even bother calling frequent contacts over cell any more.
i recall only one time where whatsapp voice was ok-ish (better then regular cellphone) quality but the lag totally killed the conversation. when someone calls me via xy-voice i usually deny it and call them back via cell. it became a meme that only cheapos do this some time ago.
international might be different as quality and lag issues are more prevalent and money is usually what keeps the conversation short.
> They've now come along to start messing with the privacy to start selling ads. It is insane that they're able to make such a mess of this. Is there a word for anti-innovation?
Yes, "capitalism".
The problem with capitalism is that despite lofty claims about it spurring on innovation and such, it pretty much does the opposite. I don't imagine that this will be a popular comment on here, but alas, it is how it is.
Innovation means experimentation with uncertain outcomes, but humans (including investors) generally dislike uncertainty in their lives. Those two factors combined mean that from a capitalist perspective, it makes a lot more sense to invest in a tried-and-true method with a veneer of innovation but predictable returns, than to truly innovate.
If you truly want innovation, then what you need to do is to take away the personal cost of failure (including but not limited to financially) as much as possible - across the board. The VC startup model is often claimed to do this, but really it just moves the cost of failure to the investors, it does not eliminate it.
In a capitalist socioeconomic model, where having a cost of failure is a fundamental tenet of the ideology (it's what defines the hierarchy), this sort of "anti-innovation" will always keep happening. It's simply the logical thing to do under the circumstances.
> it pretty much does the opposite. I don't imagine that this will be a popular comment on here
Silicon Valley and HN talk the talk of innovation, but they back monopolists. Time and again you will see this. Peter Thiel argues for this in his "Competition Is For Losers" talk.
The constant theme is this: we want innovation so far as it can bring about abrupt and massive growth and lead to a single company dominating a market. Uber, AirBnb, Facebook, Google, Amazon. These are all businesses backed by VC that are by design monopolies. They create the market and own it. Or, like Uber and AirBnb, they overturn the old order and toss up a wall around it. Profit is at odds with competition.
Once a business reaches a certain size, the organization no longer needs innovation. It's much easier to buy rather than build. Building requires figuring out product-market-fit and it's much cheaper and faster to buy a company that already figured that out.
That's also why you can have a world-class R&D lab like Xerox and see all of your innovations brought to market by outsiders (Apple + Microsoft in the '80s). Your organization is not necessarily equipped to understand how to utilize the innovations it creates. It doesn't understand how to sell or market the inventions. So it doesn't.
> If you truly want innovation, then what you need to do is to take away the personal cost of failure
We already reduce financial risk with bankruptcy laws. Reducing risk is one thing, but if you lean too far into that with VC money you can end up with WeWork or Theranos. Or any of the 2000s dot-com. Businesses that are little more than inflating worthless assets for some fraudulent payoff.
Reducing risk isn't the key. You need skin in the game. But more important, you need people with drive. People that like winning more than they hate losing.
> to allow external systems to connect in so that businesses can do business on there. The voice calls are also a disaster
While I agree with privacy things with you but business on whatsapp doesn't have to require privacy violations. In fact my experience has been good overall. Restaurants have used this as menu replacements, which is the best feature I have seen in a long time. But all they require to do this is give me there number. Facebook had a good feature, they are ruining it because all they know is to make money from advertisement. Its a Pidgeon holed mindset.
Also I don't know what you are talking about in terms of voice calls. I make several voicecalls on whatsapp every day for the past >5 years. Never had a problem with them.
It's absurd this article doesn't try to describe what the changes actually are. The privacy policy change doesn't functionally change anything about what data is collected or shared with Facebook. Metadata collection for ad targeting has been allowed by the privacy policy since 2016.
(1) The policy differs per country. But how is it different in practice between the EU and USA and Brasil? It's not public knowledge.
(2) It's absurd the policy doesn't describe anything useful. I tried to find if the contact book is being sent to facebook and if so, for how long. The wording is so opaque it's impossible to figure out.
The contacts have been shared since 2016. You can get your account info in the Account option, but they make it a pain to get it. Mine took 3 days for an HTML page.
The article is a short piece that basically says "Remember that kerfuffle about Whatsapp TOS that lead Facebook to put it on hold? It's back on". For that purpose the paragraph it does include describing the kinds of changes at stake should be enough. It's not an in-depth piece explaining the nature of the changes and in which cases they are indeed just "clarifications" as Facebook claims.
In 2016 WhatsApp let users opt-out of Facebook data sharing with third parties by just checking a box in Account Settings [1]. Most of my friends and family did opt-out. Now, as far as I understand, they are being "forced to opt-in" by accepting the new ToS and Privacy Policy or, otherwise, getting locked out.
> When WhatsApp launched a major update to its privacy policy in August 2016, it started sharing user information and metadata with Facebook. At that time, the messaging service offered its billion existing users 30 days to opt out of at least some of the sharing. If you chose to opt out at the time, WhatsApp will continue to honor that choice. The feature is long gone from the app settings, but you can check whether you're opted out through the “Request account info” function in Settings.
I think we're long past the idea that general, global news producers are trying to stay factual and provide information to their readers. It's all about generating outrage as it's much easier to get people hooked on outrage than the boring truth and impartial reporting.
Yeah, pretty much PR Crisis Communications 101. I'm at some point they were also deeply concerned and promised that they would conduct a thorough investigation
It's really hard for me to understand why and how something fails or succeeds to grab the public's attention.
I've been complaining and refusing to use WhatsApp for years, mostly because it's centralized at the worst possible company. But a boycott of one is not a powerful move and no one cared.
Now, for whatever reason, nothing has effectively changed and millions suddenly care.
I mean, I'm glad they finally do, don't think it will make much of a difference, as network effect is a very strong pull, but I'm flabbergasted nonetheless.
Now, for whatever reason, nothing has effectively changed and millions suddenly care
This was discussed on a You Are Not So Smart [1] episode some time over the last few months (I had a look but couldn't find it).
The basic idea was that collective behaviour can change in an instant because of multiple pressures that have been building over time and looking for a single cause (or trigger) is fruitless because no one event has any great significance per se.
The closest that Google would bring me is a paper on 'Threshold Models of Collective Behavior' [2].
It is this one single spark. An journalist writing a story. A user complaining to his right buddies. The one executive of a big company making an announcement.
Over here (in Belgium and The Netherlands at least) so many neighborhoods have signs promoting local WhatsApp groups, complete with the logo [0]. Often to 'prevent crime'. Local municipalities install and pay for them. It is so awkward to see.
I was a bit "shocked" by that when I moved to the Netherlands, everyone there uses it and the government seems to have a responsibility in that. Between the signs like you said and the possibility to contact town hall to take an appointment and other government related services via Whatsapp (I can certainly get why people use it, because it's much more convenient that having to make a phone call).
At least the trend seems to have halted for now. These abhorrent signs are completely pointless as a crime prevention device (obviously).
It's free advertising in two ways. One is for Facebook/WhatsApp (the use of these signs further normalizes WhatsApp and strengthens the brand), and the other is as a friendly gesture to criminals: here live people who can't afford fancy alarm systems and private security subscriptions, but can afford plenty of easily stolen devices and other loot.
You're not alone. I have been doing the same, but not just WhatsApp, also Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple.. Any company that abuses it's power to lock down, sell data from or attempt to control their users.
It's often pretty lonely. Ive had friends simply stop talking with me. Ive been left out of weddings, birthdays, etc. I guess it's like trying to be a vegan at a BBQ.
Worst part is that when what Id feared comes true, they just move on to the next worse option and the cycle continues.
Dont you think that maybe you are taking things a bit far if you are losing lots of friends over it? What's your threat model?
You can bridge a number of these services if you want. Or use a locked down device for them. FAANG privacy crap causing you to lose friends is kinda letting them win a bit too much.
>It's really hard for me to understand why and how something fails or succeeds to grab the public's attention.
If you can collectively get outraged about something with a group of people, you tend to feel "woke" and belonging to a cause.
We are to the point in media, especially online smaller publications, where if you see a story that you feel like you should get outraged about, you can safely discard it as either false or at best extremely biased.
Honestly, as an engineer, looking at the way FAANG are becoming middle-men in just about every part of human life, I would rather ban all social media and more generally mass communication software outright than try and regulate it. It feels to me like it's gotten to the point where this type of software is doing more harm than good.
I know that the software itself is not the issue, the tech has potential to do good, but as humans we are just better off without it, if you ask me.
I think they made people powerless to control their experience.
Before that, people bought firewall software for their computer.
After that you had to rely on the phone manufacturers to "protect you" which
was a blatant conflict of interest. To attract app makers, they needed to give them incentives, which basically boiled down to data after the price of apps plummeted to zero.
I use Signal and I’ve encouraged my friends and family to switch as well.
But let’s be honest: WhatsApp is moving forward because they aren’t threatened by this concern or losing some users to Signal. The average user doesn’t care about anything other than easily communicating with other people at this point, and news articles like this are part of the problem.
Frankly, the sky-is-falling uproar about any and every privacy policy change from free services had burned people out and made them jaded. Tech media likes to portray every change as an egregious violation of personal privacy, yet most of this stuff is just mundane as targeting where the data never leaves the company.
The media has become the boy who cried wolf with their attempts to present every type of data collection as bad. This article doesn’t even attempt to explain what the privacy policy changes are or what it might mean. It just implies that the reader should be angry.
In 2021, everyone has heard the “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” line so many times that they’ve just accepted it and moved on with their lives. The media’s false equivalencies are simply accelerating it.
You seem to make many assumptions that are, AFAIK, false. The data is there and gets stored indefinitely. It is not only monetized for ADs, but for surveillance as well. Companies and state contact the company and buy that data about you.
Contrary to the public perception, Facebook isn’t in the business of selling data to other companies. The proposed changes don’t change that situation.
A privacy policy isn’t going to stop the state from legally accessing data they’re legally entitled to.
This is what I was trying to say with my comment above: The public perception of what these companies are doing has diverged from what they’re actually doing, and it’s making everyone so jaded that they’ve stopped paying attention to the details.
Too big to fail. WhatsApp should be transferred to something like the UN. It is no longer a cool startup/app. It is the main communication infrastructure for the majority of the planet. Yet it's in the hand of unblinking cyborgs.
I installed Signal recently, but was flabbergasted when it advised me to connect with someone they found in my phone contacts who has recently joined Signal. WTF? If I knew that my contacts were being shared with a 3rd party (Signal), I would never have signed up.
Still, better Signal than Facebook, I guess. :-/
P.S.: if I'm missing something and the check was done in privacy-conscious way, I would love to be corrected.
I don't think they are shared in the same sense that it is shared with WhatsApp/Facebook etc.
"Signal periodically sends truncated cryptographically hashed phone numbers for contact discovery. Names are never transmitted, and the information is not stored on the servers. The server responds with the contacts that are Signal users and then immediately discards this information. Your phone now knows which of your contacts is a Signal user and notifies you if your contact just started using Signal. "
"Signal periodically sends truncated cryptographically hashed phone numbers for contact discovery. Names are never transmitted, and the information is not stored on the servers. The server responds with the contacts that are Signal users and then immediately discards this information. Your phone now knows which of your contacts is a Signal user and notifies you if your contact just started using Signal. "
That depends on your aims. I announced to family/friends that I was deleting WhatsApp and asked them to install Signal, and they have done, and message me via that.
My aim was to ensure that I could still converse, but not have to use a service with which I had become disenchanted. It isn't my business whether they continue to use WhatsApp or whether they delete it.
I don't think it's possible for most people to make this a one-pass activity without it causing a lot of friction for them, but over time you can build a critical mass of your social circle on non-FB platforms that allow you to _then_ delete WhatsApp with less friction.
Step 1 for family & friends is being available on multiple platforms, because that in turn gives _their_ circle less tie-in to WhatsApp. It's only when their circle also make themselves available that they would have a painless option to remove WhatsApp, but IMO, that's OK.
Business is already conducted well on email, and if it needs sync chat for larger orgs then Slack steps in, and if it needs personal private sync chat then Signal steps in.
Same here, even less technically inclined ones. Whenever someone messages me on WhatsApp, I usually reply with, "Hey, would you mind if we switch to Signal <install link>? I'm in the process of getting off WhatsApp for obvious reasons". At that point, either they install and continue to conversation in Signal, or they reply back asking "Wha? What's wrong with WhatsApp?" at which point, I explain just how much FB's clients can know about you with the metadata they collect.
I've been trying to find a solution to bridge rooms across chats to make the change simpler for anyone, and matterbridge[^1] does a lovely job - except for Signal.
Moxie made it stupidly hard to connect to Signal with anything that's not the official app, which is definitely a hostile act towards anyone who doesn't want to have the Signal app on their phone - the Signal desktop software needs the mobile app to work:
"To use the Signal desktop app, Signal must first be installed on your phone."
I definitely have my issues with Signal. That said, it's simple, and works reasonably well, it's just not a nice system at all from the dev/libre perspective.
I found the most easy way to motivate people to switch, is to just remove your WhatsApp profile-picture and set your status to something like "Find me on Signal".
The amount of people reaching out via WhatsApp lowered drastically, all (but one) of my main contacts are now also on Signal.
From what I remember reading a while back, Signal uses a couple constant bitrates (Basically just high or low I think) to remove even more metadata about your calls and prevent metadata fingerprinting. It's a performance/privacy tradeoff, but it goes to show just how seriously they incorporate cryptographic security into the apps design.
Readit News
Facebook has entirely failed to utilise it - to allow external systems to connect in so that businesses can do business on there. The voice calls are also a disaster.
They've now come along to start messing with the privacy to start selling ads. It is insane that they're able to make such a mess of this. Is there a word for anti-innovation?
Considering that they're linking Facebook ad platform with the chats, and they're forcing this upon everyone, why isn't this covered by the monopoly laws? Most of us paid some money for the app.
They weren’t allowed to do that under old TOS, and the whole point of this update is to allow data sharing when contacting businesses, that will allow building business tools.
https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/answer...
It brings more functionality like Messenger to interface with businesses - which I have found value in. For instance United service there was quicker and better than using the phone line to change/re-book flights.
Maybe I'm missing something?
> The messaging platform laid out fresh terms in January, aimed at increasing business transactions on the platform.
Why have 1bn users and make $1 per user? Isn't it better if then have 200mn users and make $20 per user?
For me this 'shedding freeloaders and privacy-oriented-users' helps them more than not.
We have discussed pricing and volumes of customers before in this forum, multiple times, and for multiple products/services.
Is it better to have 1000 users and make $1 from each ($1000), or it is better to have 100 users and make $50 from each ($5000 and less support/maintenance/infrastructure costs)?
Facebook's obligation is to the shareholders. Shareholders want bigger pie. Shareholders will get a bigger pie. Apparently FB didn't lose enough users to be scared. Reality/facts drive this.
In a related note, I installed Viber. It asked me to share data with advertisers. I tapped to see the list. I scrolled (on my android phone) VERY fast, for 22 seconds to go through it.
One decade ago:
s/Whatapp/Skype/g
s/Facebook/Microsoft/g
Skype, on the other hand, was about audio- or videoconferencing from a computer, and so it wasn’t quite as much a part of the ordinary person's life as Whatsapp.
No! Whatsapp is a service! Lots of people have been warning you that this is what happens when you get tools and services confused. I had warned people on here about this exact thing happening years ago when everyone thought it was the new hotness. People on this board were telling me I'm being overly cautious but this happens almost every time. Stop tying your identity and data to services if you're not 100% ok with them completely screwing you over!
Jabber has OMEMO and we have deltachat and autocrypt for email now. There is no reason to ever do this!
>Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition.
>The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.
When FB bought WhatsApp and Instagram they made explicit promises to regulators not to do this in order to get permission.
To make things even worse. Zuck wrote in email “It is better to buy than compete,” after buying Instagram.
Do you have copy of those legal binding promises?
Tech people with a high degree of suspicion and high disposable income are the exception. Even within that group, most people won’t put their money where their mouth is when given the option.
If they'd start asking for money now there will be a mass migration to any other free service. We did it many times with instant messengers on PCs in the 90s and the early 2000s. People ponders about $10 vs $9 but they take no time moving from $1 to free.
One day they spammed like 20 messages in a row, so I blocked them. If blocking was not allowed, I would just uninstall Whatsapp.
Deleted Comment
Selling user data and advertising is pretty much the end goal of most "free" applications that suddenly pop up on the scene, and that end goal is set from the start (whether to monetize the app yourself or sell/get acquired by a company that will monetize it).
With Whatsapp I would often get lag, echo and generally poor voice quality, with Signal it just works perfectly, even better than regular phone calls.
Give it a try and check if it's worth it for you.
i recall only one time where whatsapp voice was ok-ish (better then regular cellphone) quality but the lag totally killed the conversation. when someone calls me via xy-voice i usually deny it and call them back via cell. it became a meme that only cheapos do this some time ago.
international might be different as quality and lag issues are more prevalent and money is usually what keeps the conversation short.
Yes, "capitalism".
The problem with capitalism is that despite lofty claims about it spurring on innovation and such, it pretty much does the opposite. I don't imagine that this will be a popular comment on here, but alas, it is how it is.
Innovation means experimentation with uncertain outcomes, but humans (including investors) generally dislike uncertainty in their lives. Those two factors combined mean that from a capitalist perspective, it makes a lot more sense to invest in a tried-and-true method with a veneer of innovation but predictable returns, than to truly innovate.
If you truly want innovation, then what you need to do is to take away the personal cost of failure (including but not limited to financially) as much as possible - across the board. The VC startup model is often claimed to do this, but really it just moves the cost of failure to the investors, it does not eliminate it.
In a capitalist socioeconomic model, where having a cost of failure is a fundamental tenet of the ideology (it's what defines the hierarchy), this sort of "anti-innovation" will always keep happening. It's simply the logical thing to do under the circumstances.
Silicon Valley and HN talk the talk of innovation, but they back monopolists. Time and again you will see this. Peter Thiel argues for this in his "Competition Is For Losers" talk.
The constant theme is this: we want innovation so far as it can bring about abrupt and massive growth and lead to a single company dominating a market. Uber, AirBnb, Facebook, Google, Amazon. These are all businesses backed by VC that are by design monopolies. They create the market and own it. Or, like Uber and AirBnb, they overturn the old order and toss up a wall around it. Profit is at odds with competition.
Once a business reaches a certain size, the organization no longer needs innovation. It's much easier to buy rather than build. Building requires figuring out product-market-fit and it's much cheaper and faster to buy a company that already figured that out.
That's also why you can have a world-class R&D lab like Xerox and see all of your innovations brought to market by outsiders (Apple + Microsoft in the '80s). Your organization is not necessarily equipped to understand how to utilize the innovations it creates. It doesn't understand how to sell or market the inventions. So it doesn't.
> If you truly want innovation, then what you need to do is to take away the personal cost of failure
We already reduce financial risk with bankruptcy laws. Reducing risk is one thing, but if you lean too far into that with VC money you can end up with WeWork or Theranos. Or any of the 2000s dot-com. Businesses that are little more than inflating worthless assets for some fraudulent payoff.
Reducing risk isn't the key. You need skin in the game. But more important, you need people with drive. People that like winning more than they hate losing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2bYwYxqJCM&t=2698s
“Creative destruction” is often used to describe the phenomenon you’re describing.
It can also mean selling off critical components of a working business for more than the business is (currently) worth.
While I agree with privacy things with you but business on whatsapp doesn't have to require privacy violations. In fact my experience has been good overall. Restaurants have used this as menu replacements, which is the best feature I have seen in a long time. But all they require to do this is give me there number. Facebook had a good feature, they are ruining it because all they know is to make money from advertisement. Its a Pidgeon holed mindset.
Also I don't know what you are talking about in terms of voice calls. I make several voicecalls on whatsapp every day for the past >5 years. Never had a problem with them.
I disagree that WA is mainly popular due to functionality. Yes, it works, but it was mainly network effect (much like FB).
can even use it from pc/tablet if i misplaced my phone ;)
(1) The policy differs per country. But how is it different in practice between the EU and USA and Brasil? It's not public knowledge.
(2) It's absurd the policy doesn't describe anything useful. I tried to find if the contact book is being sent to facebook and if so, for how long. The wording is so opaque it's impossible to figure out.
https://twitter.com/majek04/status/1348574409968275456
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/25/whatsapp-to-share-user-dat...
> When WhatsApp launched a major update to its privacy policy in August 2016, it started sharing user information and metadata with Facebook. At that time, the messaging service offered its billion existing users 30 days to opt out of at least some of the sharing. If you chose to opt out at the time, WhatsApp will continue to honor that choice. The feature is long gone from the app settings, but you can check whether you're opted out through the “Request account info” function in Settings.
https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-facebook-data-share-not...
I've been complaining and refusing to use WhatsApp for years, mostly because it's centralized at the worst possible company. But a boycott of one is not a powerful move and no one cared.
Now, for whatever reason, nothing has effectively changed and millions suddenly care.
I mean, I'm glad they finally do, don't think it will make much of a difference, as network effect is a very strong pull, but I'm flabbergasted nonetheless.
This was discussed on a You Are Not So Smart [1] episode some time over the last few months (I had a look but couldn't find it).
The basic idea was that collective behaviour can change in an instant because of multiple pressures that have been building over time and looking for a single cause (or trigger) is fruitless because no one event has any great significance per se.
The closest that Google would bring me is a paper on 'Threshold Models of Collective Behavior' [2].
[1] https://youarenotsosmart.com/
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778111?seq=1
It is a spark. Or a butterfly ;)
[0] https://cdn.nieuws.nl/media/sites/305/2016/05/14195316/Borde...
It's free advertising in two ways. One is for Facebook/WhatsApp (the use of these signs further normalizes WhatsApp and strengthens the brand), and the other is as a friendly gesture to criminals: here live people who can't afford fancy alarm systems and private security subscriptions, but can afford plenty of easily stolen devices and other loot.
It's often pretty lonely. Ive had friends simply stop talking with me. Ive been left out of weddings, birthdays, etc. I guess it's like trying to be a vegan at a BBQ.
Worst part is that when what Id feared comes true, they just move on to the next worse option and the cycle continues.
You can bridge a number of these services if you want. Or use a locked down device for them. FAANG privacy crap causing you to lose friends is kinda letting them win a bit too much.
If you can collectively get outraged about something with a group of people, you tend to feel "woke" and belonging to a cause.
We are to the point in media, especially online smaller publications, where if you see a story that you feel like you should get outraged about, you can safely discard it as either false or at best extremely biased.
But it has effectively changed, we like to ignore contracts/laws/T&C's and focus on the technology but those things really matter for a large company.
Can't it be due to coronavirus lockdowns? People have more time to read such news and discuss with others.
I know that the software itself is not the issue, the tech has potential to do good, but as humans we are just better off without it, if you ask me.
PS. Not looking to argue. Just wanted to vent.
I think people overestimate the value that Facebook gives them because of the social graph it holds ransom.
Before that, people bought firewall software for their computer.
After that you had to rely on the phone manufacturers to "protect you" which was a blatant conflict of interest. To attract app makers, they needed to give them incentives, which basically boiled down to data after the price of apps plummeted to zero.
But let’s be honest: WhatsApp is moving forward because they aren’t threatened by this concern or losing some users to Signal. The average user doesn’t care about anything other than easily communicating with other people at this point, and news articles like this are part of the problem.
Frankly, the sky-is-falling uproar about any and every privacy policy change from free services had burned people out and made them jaded. Tech media likes to portray every change as an egregious violation of personal privacy, yet most of this stuff is just mundane as targeting where the data never leaves the company.
The media has become the boy who cried wolf with their attempts to present every type of data collection as bad. This article doesn’t even attempt to explain what the privacy policy changes are or what it might mean. It just implies that the reader should be angry.
In 2021, everyone has heard the “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” line so many times that they’ve just accepted it and moved on with their lives. The media’s false equivalencies are simply accelerating it.
You can read a summary of the proposed changes here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202...
Contrary to the public perception, Facebook isn’t in the business of selling data to other companies. The proposed changes don’t change that situation.
A privacy policy isn’t going to stop the state from legally accessing data they’re legally entitled to.
This is what I was trying to say with my comment above: The public perception of what these companies are doing has diverged from what they’re actually doing, and it’s making everyone so jaded that they’ve stopped paying attention to the details.
WeChat would like to have a word.
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sure? afaik whatsapp is "only" domniant in five-eyes, europe and latin-america but thats not where the majority of ppl live.
I think the bounds of your knowledge are deceiving you as to the extent to which WhatsApp is used all over the world.
It is the dominant communication app in the entirety of the middle east, Africa and Asia (not including China) also.
The majority of the planet doesn't use the internet.
Only a slight majority of the planet even has the option to use the internet.
Still, better Signal than Facebook, I guess. :-/
P.S.: if I'm missing something and the check was done in privacy-conscious way, I would love to be corrected.
"Signal periodically sends truncated cryptographically hashed phone numbers for contact discovery. Names are never transmitted, and the information is not stored on the servers. The server responds with the contacts that are Signal users and then immediately discards this information. Your phone now knows which of your contacts is a Signal user and notifies you if your contact just started using Signal. "
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...
"Signal periodically sends truncated cryptographically hashed phone numbers for contact discovery. Names are never transmitted, and the information is not stored on the servers. The server responds with the contacts that are Signal users and then immediately discards this information. Your phone now knows which of your contacts is a Signal user and notifies you if your contact just started using Signal. "
I think, you should read up a bit on how Signal manages contacts/address books.
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
Afaik, Signal servers have no information who your contacts are.
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I have seen family and friends _add_ Signal but few actually _removing_ Whatsapp from their phone. Which is not a success.
That depends on your aims. I announced to family/friends that I was deleting WhatsApp and asked them to install Signal, and they have done, and message me via that.
My aim was to ensure that I could still converse, but not have to use a service with which I had become disenchanted. It isn't my business whether they continue to use WhatsApp or whether they delete it.
Step 1 for family & friends is being available on multiple platforms, because that in turn gives _their_ circle less tie-in to WhatsApp. It's only when their circle also make themselves available that they would have a painless option to remove WhatsApp, but IMO, that's OK.
It is a success, but playing the long game.
Business is already conducted well on email, and if it needs sync chat for larger orgs then Slack steps in, and if it needs personal private sync chat then Signal steps in.
Moxie made it stupidly hard to connect to Signal with anything that's not the official app, which is definitely a hostile act towards anyone who doesn't want to have the Signal app on their phone - the Signal desktop software needs the mobile app to work:
"To use the Signal desktop app, Signal must first be installed on your phone."
https://signal.org/download/
I definitely have my issues with Signal. That said, it's simple, and works reasonably well, it's just not a nice system at all from the dev/libre perspective.
[^1]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/
The amount of people reaching out via WhatsApp lowered drastically, all (but one) of my main contacts are now also on Signal.