This policy change got to clash with GDPR since they made it mandatory? I don’t use WhatsApp but someone who does should file a complain.
Either way; 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 your service being free, the only thing you can do is to look at what you have; User data.
At first, you just sell this info to your “trusted” partners because you want to be able to sleep at night, but as the revenue keeps on growing, your investors realize you have a money printing machine at your hands.
At this point you you’ve lost your compass and forgot why you even founded the thing, being stuck at a big table discussing with investors and lawyers how to find loopholes in the new iteration of the GDPR laws, ending the meeting with deciding to funnel a big chunk of cash to lobby the law out of existence.
At this point, everybody looses except from the stock owners. Or maybe you find it hard to sleep at night, because even thought you now have infinite amounts of cash, you lost a part of yourself that day when you threw your entire user base under the bus.
> This policy change got to clash with GDPR since they made it mandatory?
Facebook (and plenty of other companies) breach the GDPR with non-compliant consent flows (similarly, you are forced to consent to tracking to visit Facebook or Instagram even as a guest without logging in) and refusing to fulfil data subject access requests and seem to get away with it. GDPR enforcement is a joke.
I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason behind that. But I must say, I already forgot two pins and there's now a pop up for the third one asking me to insert it every time I open the app, and I have absolutely no idea what this pin is either. Not entering it though doesn't seem to be preventing me from using the app though, so that's also weird. Meh, still not too much of a deal breaker to stop using Signal.
I have my pin in my password manager, but I can't tell Signal that. So it hassles me all the time. If I try and disable pin protection it gives me a scary warning about losing all my messages.
they are asking you for the pin to remind you of it. When you enetered it correctly they are using a spaced repetition algorithm [0] for the next date they show that prompt.
When WhatsApp was bought by Facebook they specifically excluded that this would happen to get the OK from some EU commission. I do wonder how this will go down with them.
Google had something related to not associating data from doubleclick ads with users but that seems to have been thrown out the window and not acted upon by the US government.
SMS are not free in the majority of countries. Group discussions are not easily conducted. Exchange of non-textual information (images, sound, video, etc.) requires something "more" (e.g. MMS).
This does not surprise me much. There have been more than two or three occasions in the past two years where Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were having connection issues simultaneously, which for me is an indication of how the services are getting more integrated.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadEither way; 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 your service being free, the only thing you can do is to look at what you have; User data.
At first, you just sell this info to your “trusted” partners because you want to be able to sleep at night, but as the revenue keeps on growing, your investors realize you have a money printing machine at your hands.
At this point you you’ve lost your compass and forgot why you even founded the thing, being stuck at a big table discussing with investors and lawyers how to find loopholes in the new iteration of the GDPR laws, ending the meeting with deciding to funnel a big chunk of cash to lobby the law out of existence.
At this point, everybody looses except from the stock owners. Or maybe you find it hard to sleep at night, because even thought you now have infinite amounts of cash, you lost a part of yourself that day when you threw your entire user base under the bus.
Facebook (and plenty of other companies) breach the GDPR with non-compliant consent flows (similarly, you are forced to consent to tracking to visit Facebook or Instagram even as a guest without logging in) and refusing to fulfil data subject access requests and seem to get away with it. GDPR enforcement is a joke.
Settings -> Privacy -> Disable "PIN reminders" under "Signal PIN".
[0] https://support.signal.org/hc/de/articles/360007059792-Signa...
EDIT: they already got fined 3 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whatsapp-m-a-facebook-eu-...
Glad I made the transition, you should too.