I've been wondering lately how feasible it would be to build an e2e encrypted social networking service. Just give people a completely secure place to store their photos, build a network of friends, message people, and promote social events without having their data mined for advertisements and government subpoenas.
I think some significant breakthroughs need to happen re: homomorphic encryption for this to be feasible at all. Search, recommendations, and integration all would be significantly degraded otherwise compared to something like Facebook.
I think Apple is trying to move towards local-data, that is, taking traditional cloud based services and putting them into the device. The idea being that your data doesn't have to be aggregated centrally in order to apply machine learning and develop connections. Your data is yours to control. I don't know how effective this move will be.
It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the message metadata and linking your WhatsApp use to your Facebook account.
But what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public, but not have their words live in perpetuity.
What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.
WhatsApp is really the first E2E messaging app that you can actually get your friends to use because it's blazing fast, the UI is friendly, and the E2E is 99% transparent.
You don't actually have to verify the signatures in WhatsApp assuming that at some point you believe you're talking to the right person which can be gleaned a million different ways. Then you can/should be suspicious if it changes.
It needs access to your contacts list, something I am not willing to grant it, given that it's owned by Facebook. Otherwise it doesn't work. Singal and Wire work regardless.
I think that the core concept of the article is somewhat misplaced.
What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. Then came the better UI, emoticons, group chats and network effects.
Only few people understand the privacy differences with SMS. Proof: how many security codes did you verify compared to the number of your active contacts?
About Twitter, its growth is limited not because of privacy concerns but because everybody understands that it's a public chat. Privacy is not even in the equation, nobody expects it so nobody is concerned about it. It's really down to the I don't have anything to say in public thing. People have a lot to say to friends but little to strangers. Not everybody is a blogger or has to send press releases, and even them, maybe only in their working persona.
To recap. Not only it's comparing apples to oranges (the post acknowledge that) but privacy is not a factor in both IMs and Twitter, unless you think that parents' advice "do not talk to strangers" is about privacy.
Not sure where you're located but here in the UK (or Italy) SMS are not free, unless you have a mobile plan and/or you're texting someone on the same network. Good luck if you're texting someone in another country.
That's why (almost) everybody in Europe uses WhatsApp. I use SMS _only_ to receive 2FA codes.
I think whatsapp is great for having short conversations with family over seas. Text messaging is expensive and calling/Skype would be overkill for small questions
"free" is a bit misleading, imo. If you pay for a monthly subscription, then... yes, but really no (although this might be beside the point you make). And Pay-as-you-go cards are also a thing, where it is certainly not true (although such cards have been made borderline completely useless with the new idiotically formulated 'roaming free' EU rules).
They added a clause in the law in which the service providers are allowed to sell prepaid cards with roaming disabled completely. Several (in Sweden all but one, France at least the one I'm using) service providers chose this option for their prepaid.
The why is quite obvious, instead of upping the price on the per-minute/-sms charges on prepaid, they disabled it to force you to buy a monthly subscription instead. For me, this means that my phone does not work anywhere in EU anymore except Sweden and France (and I have two SIMs) unless I increase my phone spending with about 2000% (yes, I do not use my phone much), I cannot change the contracts because I cannot live in two countries at once [#], and will most likely lose the number I have had for over 20 years.
Even so, if I change to a monthly subscription they are allowed to cancel my contract if I "misuse" the new roaming rules, which I will because I want to keep my Swedish number but I will not live there for several more years (at least).
The new roaming rules only helps tourists (although I believe that the monthly fees have gone up all over EU since the transition to "roaming free" rules, so only the service providers are gaining anything on the transition). For people who have to be mobile across the EU it is a total nightmare. This has made me very angry (perhaps unproportionately so), and it is my opinion that the EU MPs that put forth this law should be ashamed and this is a complete failure.
[#] I can change it in France, since I live here, but I'm moving away from here soon, so why bother, but not to Sweden. So I have to break some country's law by saying I move back to Sweden when I don't, change my contract, move to where I actually am, and then lose my number anyway at 1000% the cost of my old card. And when I move, since this is not to France nor Sweden, but still in the EU, my phone will not work at all moving there! All things you have to do when moving to a new country I have to manage without a phone now.
Not free, even now. There are plans with a limited number of messages per month (100 to 1000). The teenager children of my friends used up them in no time. Then came WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat.
Messaging inside the EU costs as much as messaging inside one's own country now but this is very recent. Messaging between other countries can cost up to 2 Euro per message. Not a typo. One wonders if it is to empty people accounts. I put my phone in airplane mode whenever I'm outside the EU and use Wi-Fi to call and text.
Hmm, not sure these examples make much sense here. Yes Twitter is losing popularity and WhatsApp is gaining it, but remember that:
1. For most people, WhatsApp's key draw isn't privacy or encryption, it's a convenient way of messaging people for free. It's replaced standard text messaging for many of them, and IM clients for others. Similarly, Twitter may be mostly public, but that's not really why people might not be using it so much any more. Instead, I'd blame its continually worsening reputation (associated with mobs, doxing and people getting attacked for 'wrongthink'), general decline in quality due to recent political events taking over everything and poor management that doesn't understand what its users really want from the service.
The fact these services can be used to represent 'privacy' or a lack of it is a nice coincidence.
2. The two services aren't really direct competitors. People don't use WhatsApp to replace Twitter or vice versa. It could be more useful to look up what those WhatsApp users were using before switching to the app, and figuring out where Twitter users go after they leave.
Can't really compare Twitter to WhatsApp since they are in entirely different categories of apps. Twitter is a social network, and WhatsApp is a messenger.
None the less, privacy deserves to be more popular than ever.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadBut what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public, but not have their words live in perpetuity.
What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.
You don't actually have to verify the signatures in WhatsApp assuming that at some point you believe you're talking to the right person which can be gleaned a million different ways. Then you can/should be suspicious if it changes.
What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. Then came the better UI, emoticons, group chats and network effects.
Only few people understand the privacy differences with SMS. Proof: how many security codes did you verify compared to the number of your active contacts?
About Twitter, its growth is limited not because of privacy concerns but because everybody understands that it's a public chat. Privacy is not even in the equation, nobody expects it so nobody is concerned about it. It's really down to the I don't have anything to say in public thing. People have a lot to say to friends but little to strangers. Not everybody is a blogger or has to send press releases, and even them, maybe only in their working persona.
To recap. Not only it's comparing apples to oranges (the post acknowledge that) but privacy is not a factor in both IMs and Twitter, unless you think that parents' advice "do not talk to strangers" is about privacy.
I disagree. I'm pretty sure having to pay extra for SMS and limits on the number of messages were things of the distant past before WhatsApp started.
That's why (almost) everybody in Europe uses WhatsApp. I use SMS _only_ to receive 2FA codes.
I think whatsapp is great for having short conversations with family over seas. Text messaging is expensive and calling/Skype would be overkill for small questions
I don't like SMS, but WhatsApp gets the same stuff wrong (tying it to an arbitrary hard-to-remember phone number, no desktop client, etc...).
[1]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... (those eights are supposed to be ticks, not the number of messages)
The why is quite obvious, instead of upping the price on the per-minute/-sms charges on prepaid, they disabled it to force you to buy a monthly subscription instead. For me, this means that my phone does not work anywhere in EU anymore except Sweden and France (and I have two SIMs) unless I increase my phone spending with about 2000% (yes, I do not use my phone much), I cannot change the contracts because I cannot live in two countries at once [#], and will most likely lose the number I have had for over 20 years.
Even so, if I change to a monthly subscription they are allowed to cancel my contract if I "misuse" the new roaming rules, which I will because I want to keep my Swedish number but I will not live there for several more years (at least).
The new roaming rules only helps tourists (although I believe that the monthly fees have gone up all over EU since the transition to "roaming free" rules, so only the service providers are gaining anything on the transition). For people who have to be mobile across the EU it is a total nightmare. This has made me very angry (perhaps unproportionately so), and it is my opinion that the EU MPs that put forth this law should be ashamed and this is a complete failure.
[#] I can change it in France, since I live here, but I'm moving away from here soon, so why bother, but not to Sweden. So I have to break some country's law by saying I move back to Sweden when I don't, change my contract, move to where I actually am, and then lose my number anyway at 1000% the cost of my old card. And when I move, since this is not to France nor Sweden, but still in the EU, my phone will not work at all moving there! All things you have to do when moving to a new country I have to manage without a phone now.
It spread like fire with Europeans being able to text across countries. Texting was free within country, but between was expensive.
Messaging inside the EU costs as much as messaging inside one's own country now but this is very recent. Messaging between other countries can cost up to 2 Euro per message. Not a typo. One wonders if it is to empty people accounts. I put my phone in airplane mode whenever I'm outside the EU and use Wi-Fi to call and text.
so you say i can stop boycotting them?
1. For most people, WhatsApp's key draw isn't privacy or encryption, it's a convenient way of messaging people for free. It's replaced standard text messaging for many of them, and IM clients for others. Similarly, Twitter may be mostly public, but that's not really why people might not be using it so much any more. Instead, I'd blame its continually worsening reputation (associated with mobs, doxing and people getting attacked for 'wrongthink'), general decline in quality due to recent political events taking over everything and poor management that doesn't understand what its users really want from the service.
The fact these services can be used to represent 'privacy' or a lack of it is a nice coincidence.
2. The two services aren't really direct competitors. People don't use WhatsApp to replace Twitter or vice versa. It could be more useful to look up what those WhatsApp users were using before switching to the app, and figuring out where Twitter users go after they leave.
None the less, privacy deserves to be more popular than ever.