I created a new burner FB account (I don't use FB) to go with my Quest 2.
I used a fake name and a gmail burner account.
However I've had to enter my credit card details to make payments so they have my real name, bank details and address information. They also know what I'm watching, what I'm buying etc
So my question is - do they call me out at some point and tell me to add a real name or prove my ID. Or do they let me carry on under my burner account because they can still profit from me both from my spend on apps/games and by selling my real data?
imo Facebook has enough data that if you want to use it completely anonymously there is no reasonable way to put in half of the effort, and even Visa gifts cards won't be enough.
I'm split here between saying "Doesn't mean you need to make it easy for them." and "How 'interesting' must a completely anonymous account look inside FB?"...
It's very hard to say, and I would imagine it's hard to say even for the average Facebook employee too, given how large the company is. If it was a single coherent entity with its own knowledge map (which, last I checked, it still isn't, but I will check again in 2022), we could probably reason differently about it though.
If you've got $200 and a chip in your shoulder, Oculus' arbitration clause in their user agreement ensures that if you pay $200, Oculus will pay thousands to handle the arbitration, and case law so far says they can't "combine" arbitration cases just because its convenient for them to do so.
I no longer have an oculus HMD, but Oculus no longer has any profit from me.
You’re telling me! I got my mom an Oculus since she wouldn’t need a beefy computer to run VR. A few weeks after getting it, they want the Oculus account switched over to Facebook. Luckily, she can use the Oculus account for a few more years, but it was still so annoying.
The sooner they take such actions the better it is for everyone in the long run. Someone somewhere will come up with an alternative that is better than anything we have today. And sorry but Signal is not the pinnacle of messaging.
I like what Matrix is doing but they are far away from becoming mainstream. Within 2-3 years a new platform will rise and it will fix flaws of existing messaging apps. This will then be followed by social media but it might take another 6-7 years to fix that mess.
I just installed element today (the new name for riot)
It’s interesting and may have some features like rooms that will build interest outside of just being an IM tool. I do miss the days of AIM/Jabber/Google Talk/ where everything just worked. Bringing that experience to phones should be the goal rather than jumping from service to service.
My friends from Europe and Brazil are locked into WhatsApp, my American friends seem to prefer FB messenger. They’re really using 2 versions of the same company’s products which are “incompatible” at this point. Facebook could make them compatible with one another and with each other only OR they could do the socially beneficially thing and use an open protocol. Unless employees at FB push for this, they’re likely to take the former route.
God dammit we've had standards that work. Apple and Google are responsible for killing all of the decent messaging protocols by censoring the clients from their app stores.
When smartphones came out people modified IRC with support for push brokers and message replay but because of app stores this means push brokers for community maintained clients have to be maintained by the individual volunteer paying (yes! paying, shut up about the free dev accounts they don't allow you to send push notifications) for the "privilege" of submitting the app (meaning they have low to zero availability.) The relay Mozilla maintains allows servers and users to choose who brokers push messages but Apple and Google screw over their users for profit and this is the result.
This is a stretch for Android at least, Google charges a one-time $25 fee for a Play Store developer account and provides unlimited push notifications for no extra charge.
WhatsApp has such a strong network effect, that a wholesale move off is very difficult. I asked my immediate family to move to Signal and they agreed.
Then came the question - can we talk to people on whatsapp using signal because friends, aunts, uncles, cousins who live international all live on whatsapp. Moving your network, their network and their networks network becomes quite the task.
Naively it seems like the problem that will make progress at both ends with the right spark. As I image it, soon enough someone else will have already convinced part of your network to make the move.
People, in general, don't have a qualm about installing another app when it's recommended by someone they trust.
While the network effects are there, I do think messaging networks are less durable than social media networks, because you can take your contact list with you across networks.
Signal. Open source, non-profit, very good privacy defaults. Telegram seems even worse than whatsapp to be honest because they don't even have encryption on by default.
Telegram always has encryption, just no end-to-end encryption by default. This is a privacy/convenience trade-off. When chatting about groceries/memes/latest Netflix releases, you don't really need E2EE that much, and chats without E2EE are synced to all devices in Telegram, including a fully-supported desktop app.
I get this argument, but for me, needing to moderate conversations "chatting about groceries/memes/latest Netflix releases," to make sure they don't edge into discussions I'd _really_ rather have E2E encrypted is something I just _know_ will go wrong for some of the participants in chat sooner or later. _That's_ a convenience tradeoff in favour of E2E by default for me. (But yeah, not for most people...)
I'm willing to bet you money that virtually nobody adjusts their privacy settings based on topic of conversation, especially not non-tech people which is almost all users. I don't think I've ever seen anyone chat with their girlfriend and go "hey, grocery talk over, switch to e2ee now". Defaults matter and I'm certain almost no telegram conversations use e2ee as a consequence, with private info or otherwise. It's important to have it as a default and to tell people why they should use an app that does.
It’s also important to have an option to turn it off, to benefit from mass-grouping (whatsapp limits groups to 256 users, lurking or not), chat history (new group participants can’t scroll up in whatsapp) and easy continuity (phone/pc job use case). Also it is not clear if whatsapp implements the same:
as telegram does. E.g. whatsapp seems to only have an option for 7 day self-destruction, which may be too long for some use cases, and no instant destruction. Neither of two are superior privacy-wise all things considered, but stating that always-on e2ee is a most important thing is probably naive. And then you have tg bots, ui/keyboards, stickers, etc which for a regular user outweigh the security area entirely.
Also your virtual bet is lost because every time my circle discusses ‘hot’ topics in telegram (company issues, lawyer/audit-related chats, recreational drug use, etc), we go secret and warn users who do otherwise. We can’t check whether that is common or not, because those who have to be ‘secret’ may resist to admit this activity.
Prefer Telegram. My p2p communication is minimal and I manage dozens of groups with thousands of members. Telegram not only handles this but provides a lot of tools to manage groups effectively.
I prefer Element, but apparently it's not popular enough even among HN users, so don't even hope. Signal is popular among the HN users, because it was hyped for a long time by tech-journalists as a pinnacle of secure messaging, but as an app it's even worse than WhatsApp. And not very popular outside of HN. Telegram is very popular in Russia&neighbours and only mildly popular in Europe, even less so in USA. Arguably the best of 3 in terms of usability, HN users don't like it because it has some non-standard e2e encryption, which is not enabled by default in private chats.
Also, FYI, Telegram is going to introduce some paid features soon, but it's not completely clear what they'll be. There just was some talking about that's it about the time they are going to monetize it, but I'm not sure if they announced what exactly becomes paid and what doesn't.
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?
Fortunately I don't live in a place where WhatsApp is completely pervasive. I personally had luck saying "if you want to contact me use Signal, iMessage or at the very least SMS" and when people asked why, I would cite Cambridge Analytica.
Which turned out to be a bunch of hyped up marketing talk. Why does every person in SV I know seem to love the narrative that we’re being mind controlled by micro-targeted FB ads, which to be fair is what I used to believe.
Everyone on HN switches between “ads don’t work and targeting is BS” to “ads are manipulating our entire country by taking our data”
Even individuals are capable to hold contradicting opinions.
> There are lots of contradictions in people’s strongly held beliefs. Someone might preach self-sufficiency in politics, but coddle their children. An individual might oppose abortion on the grounds that human life is sacred and may still support the death penalty for convicted murders. A person might argue for the freedom of individual expression in the arts but want hateful speech to be regulated.
Need better examples as neither given are contradictory. Coddling children is not the same as coddling adults. Unborn babies commit no crime deserving of death.
I think they are both true, but the second is worded differently than I would.
I think ads can work, but don't in many cases (based on recent stories that cancelling certain kinds of ad spend has no effect on outcomes). In some cases, like Uber advertising to get users, this seems entirely plausible.
So I largely think ads themselves are kind of harmless. But ad-backed business models are dangerous, because they optimize for "engagement", which tends to promote content that is divisive over more thoughtful, nuanced content. Sadly, it also seems to require gathering huge amounts of information about users in a centralized spot, which seems risky for a variety of reasons.
The whole thing reminds me of a call I got about 10 years ago to participate in a survey about smoking, and one of the questions they asked was "Do you believe nicotine causes cancer?" I paused because my understanding is that nicotine itself doesn't cause cancer, but the common delivery mechanisms at the time (smoking, dipping) do increase the risk of cancer. They forced me to answer yes/no, so I said "no", but obviously a decade later, I still remember it. Do ads cause harm? Probably not much, taken on their own. But everything _around_ them seems to.
How do you use iMessage if you got android phone? I hate this thing, would rather give my data to facebook then use it because it creates class separation between poor and rich. I have seen it with my kids who wanted iphone because they couldn't communicate with all the iphone kids who used iMessage. That's in itself much worst to me than some privacy which i already gave up on.
Absolutely agree. iMessage is even more cancerous in its social implications than WA.
I have had smart, educated people say "I got an iphone so I wouldn't be left out of group chats". Because downloading an app is too much work. I'm not sure how asking people to take 5 seconds to do something to improve their life and society became such a taboo.
I had success moving my friend group onto Signal, but that was a group of young-ish, privacy interested, anti-Facebookers, so it wasn't much of a hard sell.
From the opposite point of view, in the last hour I’ve been added to 3 different group chats on Signal that were all previously WhatsApp chats (in which I did not participate, in spite of many of those friends repeatedly asking me to).
That’s added at least 20 or 30 friends/acquaintances into my signal contact list that I’m 99% sure downloaded signal for the first time this morning.
SMS prices (or 'lack of price') was something that really surprised me after I moved to Canada, as well as phone voicemail.
In Brazil we hurry to turn off the call if it goes into voicemail, as we pay to leave a message AND nobody listens to them because it costs a lot to listen (or at least used to).
As someone whose mobile data plan is faster than home wi-fi and who does not pay for receiving calls and SMSes, the "fixed landline data first" approach in Android really pisses me off.
You can't do group chats in the same way using SMS messages. People who receive an SMS have no idea who else the message was sent to, so they can't even "reply all".
MMS are available in UK but not popular, because they were heavily overpriced and fundamentally underwhelming when they were introduced 15 years ago. They are also metered like SMS - one of the big wins when switching from SMS to internet-based systems was to stop worrying about yet another limit.
The fragmented and quirky MMS implementations in the wild render MMS functionally useless, especially compared to what feature set an app can have. I've seen MMS implementations that send replies to only the sender of the original (so some replies, from better implementations, end up in the MMS group, and some end up only sent back to the sender, resulting in confusion); I've seen MMS implementations that allow you to "like" a message, and this is implemented by just sending "I liked this." as a message back to the other clients — which can't interpret it as anything other than just a normal message — resulting in confusion.
Did you know that MMS can transmit slideshows[1]? I didn't, until my father somehow sent me one. The UI that Android has for that is — naturally — a complete afterthought. (No way to pause the slideshow, no way to navigate the slides, nothing. Just one run through the animation at Warp 8.)
That's why I was there already, along with a few of those friends who used to be part of various WhatsApp groups as well - and they've convinced large groups of pissed off WhatsApp users to download and use Signal today.
I don't know how many of the new Signal users will stay (there's already discussion in one of the new Signal groups about "Why aren't we using Telegram instead?")
Same as much of this thread - these people are not concerned much at all about encryption details, they're largely a pissed of mob of people departing WhatsApp. And some of them are already saying "there's no web client! I can't use this!!!"
I suspect I may well end up back being "the guy who's not part of most group chats" if/when they decide Signal isn't for them... And I'm OK with that.
I've lived in several places and nobody really uses SMS unless it's for 1) someone you don't really know or 2) notifications of some sort...
My impression is the US/Canada are one of the only places where SMS is still frequently used for casual text communication and i'm horrified that Apple's iMessage is the one to somewhat challenge that.
Network effects as a emergent principle has been discovered to violate the promises of capitalist economics. We have a right to come together and set the limits and terms by which a few can extract from the many.
Why must there be extraction at all? Even trade seems like it would be better for the majority of parties involved, including having the effect of not having a bunch of pissed off people down the line.
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 reputation by pushing that too hard.
Another vote for Telegram here. I tried to get at least the core group of family/friends on Signal or Wire and to their credit they tried but it never stuck. They loved Telegram so much that we now have the entire extended family/friends on it.
Interesting that you had such a different result with Telegram. I'd prefer to use Signal for privacy reasons, but like you I burnt a lot of social capital trying to get my extended family to use it!
I had success at least moving my parents and sister to chat with me on Telegram. I was having weird issues with Telegram video call (very low sound on my parent's phones), so I still had to call them on Whatsapp. Also, didn't find any audio call option on Telegram, only video call.
Contrats !
Genuine question: Why don't you use phone call for audio-only calls ? In my experience the quality is better and degrades better. Is it because of bundles quota? In my country most plans includes unlimited voice but not sure what's the "world norm".
Does Android not have the equivalent to FaceTime audio? I get that for x-platform you have to use one of the apps being discussed. I use FT Audio with my sister, who's in UK, all the time (I'm in Chicago). Completely free and excellent sound quality.
Android (at least used to) has native support for SIP through their phone application. I used it quite a bit 5 years ago or so, but moved over to...well, I can't remember. A 3rd party app that gave better visibility over what was happening with the service. I don't use VOIP too much any more, Signal is fine.
Google was pushing Hangouts heavily for a while, and I think that's still bundled with Android but is now on the way out. It did the job last I checked.
Google surprisingly has a raft of telephony options.
You can use Google Duo to make voice or video calls for (other than data costs) free, Google hangouts also has voice-only plus video options and of course Google voice integrates with the classic telephone network and has cheap international rates.
Google Fi has free calling from the US to over 50 countries and otherwise their plans start at one cents a minute depending on destination. https://fi.google.com/about/unlimited-calling/
Most of my friends from Asia tell me WhatsApp was and is popular because it carried voice over data, bypassing the PSTN which apparently has very high per-minute rates.
If you want to go slightly higher tech there are telepresence appliances like 8x8, Amazon or Google IOT devices or you can just use sip phones and call between the devices free of charge using your own pbx software or a free service like Callcentric's IP Freedom plan.
There a million options that either let you opt out of Facebook's data collection and trade it for Google's, or just opt out entirely.
You can use a web browser aimed at the Skype website to setup a calling card equivalent system to dial out internationally over plain old telephone service for 2 cents per minute. You don't even need an app installed.
Don't get the subscription, pay as you go with Skype credit.
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.
"Signal has gotten better" is the new "Linux on the desktop". When I move to a new phone with Signal, is there already an (easy) mechanism to take along all my messages from my old phone? Last time I checked, there wasn't, and this is a core requirement, even if most people don't quite realize it when they start using Signal.
There is a mechanism that works very well and reliably. It involves manually copying an exported backup from the old phone to the new one, and entering a 16 digit (IIRC) passcode. Wheter you consider that easy or not depends on you. For me it was a 5 minute procedure
Right, I used that procedure once, it's completely inadequate. It relies on having access to the old phone, knowing how to get files off it (and onto a new phone; both of which probably assume you know how to navigate the filesystem), and you basically need to follow documentation to do it, it's completely undiscoverable (maybe that last part has changed).
All of which is completely unacceptable in 2021 for a product meant for a large audience. Messaging is integral to people's lives, to the point where people keep 10+ year old phones because they have messages on them from people that passed away and they can't figure out how to move the messages across or to a new system. As much as it pains me to say, there just aren't any production quality alternatives to WhatsApp that can take over. And don't even get me started on Element/Matrix...
You have a point, but one should point out here that WhatsApp makes this easy only if you stick with the same type of phone... if you switch between Android and iOS you're completely SOL with WhatsApp. With Signal on the other hand you can use the (admittedly non-trivial) procedure mentioned in sibling in either case.
It will be a hard sell for me to switch, that's for sure. I am already using Whatsapp for Western contacts, Kakaotalk for Korean contacts, and WeChat for China contacts. I don't have any Japan contacts currently, or else I'm sure I will have to install Line. I installed Signal on my laptop for one heavy-privacy-proponent friend, and had Telegram for a while for another friend's group business chat, but I never really used either.
What are you talking about ? Telegram encryption is based on 2048-bit RSA encryption, 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange
I moved almost all my friends and family to Telegram. I think the secret, once I managed to get them to install it, was to create common groups instead than many one-to-one chats.
Then they got hooked up, mostly thanks to the huge amount of high quality stickers.
I had better luck because most of the people I know aren't deeply invested in their apps. I just told everyone to add me on signal and over the years more people have started using it, and suggest signal or a phone call when its time to have a conversation
I managed to get almost everyone I know on Telegram in the last few years, to the point I get a WhatsApp message less than once a week. On the other hand, I usually hundreds of messages daily on Telegram. It's not hard if there's already interest among the people you talk with and you find the right way to get them on board.
Don't you think that Telegram has the same monetization problems (it burns "a few hundred million dollars a year" while the owner left Russia with $300m in his bank account a few years ago) and they already announced their monetization plans https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/telegram-to-launch-an-ad-p...
Where would you move next?
Sure the network effect is strong but let’s not forget how WhatsApp got here in the first place: people installing a strange new app, often shared by their friends via a text message invite link. I remember sitting in a circle with a group of friends one night 10+ years ago while each of us installed WhatsApp and had our first conversations on the app. It was a time when BBM was dominant and cross-platform messaging was new. Fast forward to today and already many of my groups are switching to Telegram or Signal.
The move can be made faster now because groups are so prevalent on WhatsApp.
Whatsapp had to compete with SMS, so when I was introduced to WhatsApp I thought it was a godsend and immediately adopted it. Also advertised it to all my friends. Switching now might be harder because there is a lot less to gain, besides some non-tangible “privacy”. What is this thing called “privacy”?
I was nodding along with your comment, wondering why it had been downvoted until I reached your last statement and couldn't tell if you were being serious or not.
I think (and hope) he’s just relying the difficulty of communicating the concept and value of techno-privacy to his friends and relatives - as opposed to the immediate and self-evident differential between whatsapp and sms texts.
The parent poster is likely mimicking the people asking why are you asking me move to another app when this app does everything fine?
To be honest, I'm not well versed in the debate of privacy, but invariably in discussing user tracking by BigCo's a lot of my friends just say "I don't care if they have my data, I've got nothing to hide."
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and the saying should be extended to "I've got nothing to hide, now."
Things change and either you'll do something which you'll want to hide, or society/politics/community will change which you'll have something to hide.
An example in the first case is that you'll want to buy a secret gift for someone, but because of the tracking the surprise will be spoiled because they'll be seeing ads for it on their systems.
Are they not right though? People don't really care about "privacy", they just want it to work, and work with their friends. You or I can harangue all we want but it doesn't change the fact that people don't care in aggregate.
The next time someone says me "I have nothing to hide" I'm thinking of asking their salary because in my experience when people say that they actually mean they are not afraid of jail but would rather don't have a lot of details being made public like who they vote, their sexual preferences, their wealth or their personal opinion of a lot of their colleagues. Most of these details are easily inferred from their online behavior, not to mention personal chats. Part of the problem is that no one is going to say "I have something to hide". I'm not going to continue this rant because HN is not the audience that needs it but to summarize: defending privacy is an uphill battle and people are not right.
Indeed, I was playing the devil's advocate. I definitely care about privacy and I am quite an ardent supported of projects that try to solve this issue. I just learned that if privacy comes at a large expense (losing their social graph or unfriendly UX), people will not care for it. So I guess we need to do better so we can have both privacy and good UX.
Facebook is a private company. Freedom of speech doesn't mean they are obligated to give you a megaphone for asking your mom how she is doing. They can and do ban people for any and no reason, cutting you off from your social network at a moments notice.
Even my mother, in her 70s, who somehow always manages to have a new virus or piece of crapware on her laptop every time I visit, knows about the importance of this thing called "privacy" and had no trouble grasping the idea that everything she shares on FB is recorded and used for advertising.
It's not a hard concept, and it's not just tech people who care about it. It doesn't require any knowledge of tech to understand.
On the other hand, she knows how to use FB messenger and my efforts to get her to switch to email/telegram have just caused confusion so far.
Am I off the mark in guessing your mother, in her 70’s has some strong opinions about one Senator Joe McCarthy or Hoover? Has she ever spoken much about living through that period-assuming your family are American?
My apologies for the imposition if that’s not the case.
J Edger Hoover was a cross dressing homosexual who collected blackmail on political opponents while he was himself being blackmailed by organized crime.
They call everything "a myth" and then cite strong circumstantial and testimonial evidence that those "myths" are true, only to dismiss everything with hand waving about how "we'll never know" what his extremely private and mysterious sex life was like. Give me a break.
I'm going to guess the downvotes are from people who don't know the history of people like McCarthy or Hoover's FBI and why someone who was lived through that era might be sensitive to and have opinions about topics of privacy[0][1]?
Telegram is getting really popular in India for bigger groups such as those in building societies and for parents in schools as they allow for more members. For one to one communication I don't see a change happening soon.
I've used Signal for years, and for most of that time only had about three people who also used it in my contacts.
My wife recently got her entire extended family to use Signal. She has always refused to use WhatsApp. They all love Signal now, and use it all the time. However, this was during a family crisis.
During the Covid lockdowns, many companies I know used Signal as their preferred non corporate communication platform over WhatsApp... But again, that was a crisis.
It seems to be difficult to dislodge people from their preferred platforms without some kind of external driver to adopt it.
Don't they all? But good news is that they have pushed code to allow for usernames (or not even that). It isn't open to the public (or beta) yet, but it looks like the feature is going to be released fairly soon.
That's my point. I hate systems that require a phone number, as they usually mean that I have a substandard experience when I'm not on my phone and I can't sign my children up so that we have a general chat tool.
The only option ends up being massively over the top team style chats like Rocketchat, Mattermost, Discord, or Slack. So we end up back on Hangouts.
A bit shit for general family conversation.
[Edit] If they do allow signing up/in with a username then I'll probably be all over it. That would be awesome news.
I'm curious why you value your phone number over your data.
I'm unsure if they will allow signups without phone numbers, but they don't store that information. Signal doesn't have it. [0][1] It is very possible they go around this though.
I think these are fair points. I'll mention that I predominately use the desktop client and it works well since I frequently leave my phone somewhere else. But doesn't seem like a right fit for you until usernames and multiple device signup. Both are in the works though so maybe good for you in the future but not now.
> I predominately use the desktop client and it works well since I frequently leave my phone somewhere else.
In my experience the desktop client is slow, buggy, and takes eons to start up. There's also no web version, making it awkward to use on computers other than your own.
I would be more willing to switch over to Signal if it wasn't so lacking in this regard.
How well do Signal groups work these days? I tried moving friend groups to signal some years ago and even managed to do that for some large ones but the group chat just didn't really work. Keys changed and somehow the group got into a state where some people got messages and others didn't and the only way to fix it seemed to be creating a new group which, for large groups, isn't really an option and everyone ended up going back to whatsapp.
I'd love to use signal with more people but that, and the ux around changing phones means I can't really recommend it to anyone but the most technical of my friends.
For my wife, she had to travel abroad and the family had to stay in contact with her. Since she absolutely wouldn't use WhatsApp, they all installed Signal, and discovered it's actually really usable now.
I can only speak for why one company adopted Signal over WhatsApp, but the main reason was that the company did not want their communication metadata tracked by Facebook. They were regarded as equivalent in terms of E2E encryption and functionality.
EDIT: They also did not trust Facebook entirely not to break the E2E in some way (eg cloud backups or whatever), and the message contents had to remain secure. It wasn't a huge concern, but all else being equal, Signal was the better choice.
In Europe the WhatsApp alternatives are generally framed as tools for pedophiles and organized crime. Even installing them on your phone may alert LEO that you're suspect. This move by Facebook is highly troubling.
Do you have an source for that claim. I am in Europe and have never heard that. The closest I know of is right wing groups using Telegramm for their Anti-Covid agitation.
Sorry, I have now spent almost an hour reading 7 articles of yours and, from my point of view, none supports your claim. Framing implys for me that some other person publicly claims something although that is not really the case (i.e Telegramm is not popular with criminals), else, it is just reporting.
Neither could I find anything matching your second point that installing any of these messengers might make law enforcement suspect you to be a criminal.
My friends and family have mostly been using Signal for over a year and we never had such worry. I also know laywers, lawmakers, doctors and CEOs who are also using Signal for important communications.
Er, The third link doesn't even support your argument and the first two links are written by the same author.
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Signal IS much better.
It's a nonprofit, not a commerical company.
There are arguments for and against centralized systems and forks of apps. The lead dev of Signal is concerned about interoperability; but still leaves users the option of doing things the way they would like with the open source code; it's just not 'supported™'
I managed to get most of my family to use telegram. I just stopped using whatsapp and convinced a few of them to do so also, the rest came because they couldn't speak to us otherwise.
The key was being stubborn and banking on them eventually wanting to talk to me.
> The key was being stubborn and banking on them eventually wanting to talk to me.
This. Same for me. I just put a message like this in the family whatsapp groups and then deleted the app/account: 'Hey everyone, I'm not going to be on WhatsApp anymore - you can call, text, signal, telegram or email me. Talk to you later!'. It was that simple. It took a little while but now my family is on Telegram. I know they still use WhatsApp but it's honestly not my problem or issue that they use the app - I just don't want to.
source? I assume you are refer to the thing that went around yesterday? Then no, there is a big difference between the option to share data to get a feature (even though I'd agree the feature isn't well-designed) and what WhatsApp is doing here.
You should try it again now, Signal is very user friendly these days. I've moved most of my very non-tech-savvy family and friends onto it without too much drama.
I don't know how you make your loved ones stop using specific software, and generally speaking I wouldn't want to. But if people want to contact me, well, they have to use a mechanism I also use.
I know what you're asking, but I don't think there's a fix unless you somehow have tremendous influence with them. So you either put up with being coerced by your group, or you don't.
This is probably easier if you never used the services in the first place. My mom will occasionally whine that she has to open Imessage to talk to me, and that's about the extent of it. But of course, I am missing whatever they get up to on FB without me. And that's OK with me, but I know it isn't with everyone.
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.
this is wrong way to look at things, switch is never binary. Yes i have whatsapp, but i also have discord, messenger, hangouts, etc. You need to find an angle to attract user for something different and then keep them for everything else.
How's signal different? It's also in the same position as whatsapp was a few years ago. For the time being it may be better, but surely it is not a long-term alternative?
My thoughts as well. If the product is free, who is paying the devs? Who is paying for infra? I'm exclusively on Threema since it's not free, and the yearly external code reviews are stellar. The only thing that bugged me was that it was not open source, which changed by the end of 2020. Multi device coming this year, which was the last thing missing for my use case.
Unfortunately, I'm on the same stand as you. I managed to move my direct family and one group of friends into Telegram, but the rest didn't follow and many have been pestering me to go back.
I was thinking about going back, actually, but using a separate phone number (dual SIM FTW) and a work profile sandbox with heavily restricted permissions. I might still give it a shot, see if that's enough to quell FB's insatiable hunger for personal data.
I'm wondering if someone can develop a product that addresses the networking effect problem. I.e. a service that allows groups to move their member lists seamlessly between networks and to be able to also see at a glance, which networks (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, FB Messenger, Slack) the members are on. Perhaps a network of network memberships?
This is a genuine question, what is it that prohibits your group from using text messages and phone calls? I do not use any apps for communication, and can’t think of why I would have a need.
The main lock-ins for WhatsApp with my friends/family/colleagues are:
1. Group chats. SMS group chat doesn't exist (or it's next to unknown) in Australia.
2. Sharing images and videos. SMS destroys images/videos/gifs (if they even send).
3. International. Messaging friends/colleagues when they're overseas is easy.
4. Videochat (however, it's usually FaceTime with an older relative).
I attempted a shift to Telegram with a few close friends and family members. Eventually, we started to drop back to the "normal" comms route because our extended network was on WhatsApp/iMessage and juggling several methods was irritating (e.g you message a friend on Telegram and get no response -- they then message you later that day on WhatsApp -- it's irritating to move the conversation back to Telegram).
I don't use any of the private and popular messaging apps on my phone and do rely on SMS and phone calls to stay in touch. But there are limitations:
- SMS is not encrypted.
- SMS supports text only. MMS is not well supported, and often not free.
- SMS is sometimes not as "instant" as it can be delayed.
- Delivery reports and, read receipts are not user-friendly, and maybe unreliable, too.
- Group SMS support depends on your default SMS app.
RCS or Rich Communication Service on 4g and 5g looks to fix this, but support and compatibility between network is still lacking. Privacy laws also need a reevaluation as even cellular providers are looking to data harvesting to make more money and RCS may also lack encryption support.
Thanks for sharing this, good to know. But in the context of this discussion, it is kind of bad news. Those who avoid WhatsApp (and other messengers) do so because they don't want to trapped within it - SMS and RCS promises us more mobility and privacy because it is a standardised technology that works with all cellular service providers. Using a Google app for RCS, instead of WhatsApp, will just trap you within Google ecosystem, instead of Facebook.
- many extra chat features (reactions, stickers, replies, polls, etc). It might seem unnecessary but imo they do genuinely increase functionality and ease of communication
- scalable to large groups (maybe sms is as well, I've never tried more than 3-4 people)
- don't need a phone, can message from a computer instead
Most phone companies on their lower tier plans make you pick 1-2 of free calls, texts or a data allowance. High end plans aren't nearly so popular because most people don't get high end phones and of the people that do, many buy direct from Apple so don't have a contract associated with it, instead just using a prepay or sim only plan. So it's really only the high end android phones which get bought on contract which is a much smaller market than iPhones or the actual big market segment here: €100-200 androids
Nobody picks free texts. This leaves 15c/message as a discouragement for using SMS.
Such implicit locks are quite common a hamper to let the best product succeed.
We are all running what most would consider an outdated and poorly designed c.p.u. architecture by modern standards, simply because most software is not compiled to run on other architectures, and it won't be until those architectures see significant adoption.
This is changing rapidly. Many
people I know are moving Signal. Also, don’t delete WhatsApp right away. Do a “silent” move: whenever people send you a WhatsApp answer on iMessage if they’re Apple users and actively push the Android friends over to signal. Works well in my case.
Telegram isn't serious about privacy. They made my number searchable and notified people who have me in their Google contact list even though I didn't grant Telegram access to my contact list (before the time when Android would enforce this with permissions) and didn't allow them to use my number for anything.
Then it turned out that they have a setting where one can opt out, but what good is that if you already were opted in automatically.
In "Last Seen & Online" I had a deleted account in the exceptions of those who can always see my status, even though I never added one.
Telegram may be better than WhatsApp, but it is far from fantastic.
You're right but I prefer it over WhatsApp/Facebook and I started using it when about 3/4 of my network moved to Telegram (to support their move away from WhatsApp/Facebook).
I'm fairly certain I enabled all possible privacy options when I installed telegram. I went to specific lengths to do so. I still get "xyz has joined telegram!" when a new friend joins up from my contact list.
Yep: just checked. Nothing more I can do to increase privacy settings. Zero confidence in it after that
Consider Threema instead. It recently went open source and it has top-notch, Signal-quality crypto and you don't need to provide a phone number or email.
Telegram lacks end-to-end encrypted group chats and normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, you have to switch to a "secure" chat every time you start a new chat.
I also use email (and Threema), but it annoys me a lot when I then get those "(no subject)"-Emails with multi-megabyte VID-20201225-WA0005.mp4 attachments.
I just wish they would keep all their WhatsApp stuff away from me.
WhatsApp is a masterclass in network effects. You can no longer decide whether or not you want to use it. Because your employer uses it, you have no choice but to use it. The only thing that will disrupt this is if security concerns make companies come out and explicitly ask employees not to use WhatsApp and I don't see that happening any time soon.
If your employer insists on installing and using a specific application on a phone, ask them for a phone to use it on. Don't feel the need to install it onto your personal device.
My response to anyone is "I'm sorry, but I don't use WhatsApp or Instagram, and I rarely use Facebook because I don't trust them. You can reach me through X, Y, or Z."
If someone refuses to make an actual call, text me, email me, or use Signal, then clearly they don't respect me enough for me to need to communicate with them.
When I had roommates, one only wanted to use services A, B, ... and another one C, D, ... with no intersection between the 2 sets. So we had 2 group chats on two different services and we had to transfer messages from one to the other.
I don't know whom was not respecting whom, but I didn't feel really respected either, despite respecting each guy wishes.
I managed to get a part of my family to Threema. Just the part of "you are paying for the product, thus you are not the product yourselves" was reasonable enough.
In my friends circle we are all on telegram (after trying wire which is just buggy as hell), but I think this is mainly due to its multi device story and then fact that it is not WhatsApp.
I've had success and you're right that it is about network effects. So you gotta take into account who you can convince first. But also consider that Signal hasn't been fully featured until about last month. So it isn't a good idea to just try to convert random non-techy people. For them you'd need to use current events that highlight how important privacy is (which there have been quite a few this year). But also focus on generating a critical mass. Now it isn't hard for me to convert people because we'll be planning things and 4/5 people have Signal so you just strong arm the fifth person and then they start using it more because they realize a fair amount of their friends are already there. It takes time though and let's be real about that Signal hasn't been fully featured. Until recently it has been more a geeky app.
So tldr target the people you want to convert to develop a critical mass.
My family is on Threema, but I advocated for it heavily and it's still an island and they all use WhatsApp in parallel. But at least family photos get shared on Threema now.
I simply stopped using anything except decentralized ethical services that offer freedom, privacy, and high security like Matrix.
I refuse to help walled gardens get bigger. It has cost me a lot of contacts, but so be it. There is always a choice.
If you had a friend you respected that was vegan for ethical or environmental convictions would you insist on continuing to exclusively have social gatherings at BBQ restaurants with no menu options for them? Would you take them seriously if they caved to avoid being excluded from the group?
When I deleted all walled garden messengers by Google, Facebook etc they knew I wasn't kidding. Anyone that refuses to make small allowances for you living your convictions is not your friend.
The people that need to talk to me use matrix now or found other ways to reach out like e-mail or in person. Those that don't respect my ethics don't get free advice from me anymore.
It’s a shame the technology and usages are still moving quickly enough that there’s no obvious standardization that’ll last the next five years.
Social technologies would benefit from some regulation along the lines of “you must be able to use other apps to send to/receive from your app” for at least a minimal feature set, but it would be super hard to nail down what that regulation should exactly be.
I moved my entire family onto it easily. But they are fairly conservative and so it simply was a matter of explaining the situation about big tech lying and they were sold.
Depending on your perspective, Signal is actually a worse Telegram. Telegram has the best UX and feature set ouf of all messaging apps, and privacy does not outweigh convenience for the vast majority of people.
I'm still confused as to why Telegram doesn't have message reactions which every other platform has. I understand that some peoeple feel like it's not needed but if they don't want they wouldn't have to use and in my workflow when talking in groups is to use them extensively and replying with stickers is a terrible experience.
I think the UI is better. Encryption is worse. But I like how they structured their data centers. They have sprinkled them into different countries and they claim that servers from different jurisdictions are necessary to access the data. So if an agency wants to access it, they have to get warrants from different countries. With all the war on encryption going on, e.g. forcing companies to include backdoors, I think this is the way to go.
> They have sprinkled them into different countries and they claim that servers from different jurisdictions are necessary to access the data. So if an agency wants to access it, they have to get warrants from different countries.
That's a neat trick, but not as neat as Signal's "sure, here's all the data we have - the time and ip address of their last use."
(I'm sure a bunch of the "better UX, UI, and features" people like in Telegram rely on them storing more data on their servers, so that comes down to a privacy/convenience tradeoff, which as others have pointed out almost always comes down on the convenience side for 99.99% of people...)
Signal is good for privacy and that's about it. Telegram has voice calls, videos calls, stickers and easy sticker creation, super convenient in-line gif/pic/video search, video and voice messages, and you can add people without sharing your phone number...
Seems like, no. On their EU Privacy Policy, it says:
“Today, Facebook does not use your WhatsApp account information to improve your Facebook product experiences or provide you more relevant Facebook ad experiences on Facebook.“
This was the very question I have. Presumably given this ultimatum they would pull out of the EU market? That’s great that solves the problem of getting my friends and family onto something else!
I also got the notification, but it's strange because WhatsApp in Europe is from WhatsApp Ireland Limited, and WhatsApp outside is from WhatsApp LLC.
They are different companies with different legal requirements.
I've seen some news stating that these new changes apply only to WhatsApp LLC, but the notification seem to say otherwise.
I'd like to move my family off of WhatsApp due to these concerns. I've used Signal before, but I am not a big fan of it. I often have to re-register my devices to sign in, syncing takes a long time, and conversations do not persist across devices. I am perfectly happy using a paid service. Does anyone here think Discord or Slack would be a suitable replacement?
Try Telegram. It’s as easy to use as WhatsApp for non-tech family and friends, yet has all the features you want out of an IM without too much of the bloat. It has native apps on all major platforms, and for the techies it has a solid API so you can do fun stuff like write your own bots.
Yes but it does have e2e if you “want” it and for 99.9% of people that’s enough. The other 0.1% who “need” it are more willing to learn/adapt to Signal/Wire/etc.
I use Signal with tech friends, and Telegram with family/non-tech friends. I feel like the latter using Telegram is still better than them using WhatsApp, so I’ll take what I can get.
Jumping out of the Facebook frypan into the Salesforce fire doesn't seem to be a particularly winning move...
(Which also raises the question, whichever alternative you choose, you probably need to evaluate the risk of Facebook (or some equally evil corp) acquiring them down the track. I wonder how likely Discord/Telegram/Signal are to be able to resist Facebook-sized acquisition offers?)
Signal is owned by a non-profit which cannot be sold to a for-profit like Facebook, Google, or Apple. The WhatsApp founder learned the lessons from the Facebook acquisition and improved almost every aspect when developing Signal.
I wouldn't really agree here. They are on the same topic, yes, but the Arstechnica article is actual news coverage that explains what's going on, as opposed to the linked page which is just Whatsapp's official corpospeak.
That's a dumb move from facebook unless they are planning to buy every other chat applications and ask their users to share their data with Facebook. I'm amazed that they are asking for it and not doing it already.
Once again - Signal[0] as an alternative. It's fully Open-Source (including the backend) and their crypto is public and independently verified[1][2][3]...
IMO it works just as well and unlike Telegram it's actually credible... The telegram crypto is an absolute disaster and they have been pretty shady and defensive when asked about it in the past. Not to mention the back-end is closed-source. Also, the desktop clients still don't support encryption, many years after it's been first requested.
Do you have some links regarding their disastrous encryption? The security guys i know speak highly of telegram and AFAIK it has been open sourced recently, but i am open to new information.
The Telegram backend is still closed-source as far as I know. The problem with their crypto is that nobody really knows if it's secure or not because it's closed and unverified.
Ever heard the first rule of encryption? "Never roll your own crypto". Well they broke the rule and they won't let anyone check if the crypto is secure or not.
Not to mention encryption is off by default and your plaintext messages are stored on their servers...
Stored on different servers in different jurisdictions, right? Sure it's not ideal if you want maximum security of your data, but it _is_ a huge difference from simply storing plain text.
IMHO, Signal main advantage is that you can sell it to your parents and friends like "WhatsApp, but safe".
It tries to have feature-parity to WhatsApp; looks the same, works the same. All this while researching innovations on cryptography that doesn't compromise user experience too much.
In my experience, doing exactly what WhatsApp does (but safer) makes it an easy sell to people around me.
True, though Signal annoyingly wants the user to also enable it
as SMS app. From my own experience with relatives this can lead
to a lot of confusion among non-technical users, for example
when they try to send a picture to a contact and it fails
because that contact does not use Signal. From what I've seen
Signal does not clearly show a difference between those two
groups.
Other than that it's definitely a great alternative.
Telegram is only end-to-end encrypted in a feature called secret chats. Groups and channels and individual chats are not end-to-end encrypted.
In other words, Telegram doesn't even deserve to be in the same conversation. Even if it had the best encryption out there (however you define that), that wouldn't mean anything when it's not used in like 98% of the cases (percentage pulled out of my ass).
It's like comparing Signal to Facebook's Messenger, and I'd still say Messenger over Telegram because at least it uses Signal's protocol under the hood (I believe the feature is called hidden conversations) instead of inventing its own thing and ignoring the expert opinions.
I don't think you can even use the same Signal account on two different iOS devices, much less desktop. Their desktop apps just link to the phone's app.
WhatsApp is a total joke, it loses media (IIRC this includes audio messages as well) people send you after a very short time even when you use it on a single device, so talking about multi-device usage is completely out of the overton window.
Seriously? Both only have crappy web apps that you basically tunnel messages through your phone (at least that's what I remember) and are tied to a specific mobile device with entire companies being built around the apparently extremely complicated task of moving WhatsApp messages around.
Meanwhile, the Telegram desktop client is at feature-parity with the phone app with both running entirely independently on as many devices as you want.
Signal messages are not routed through your phone. Reach has it's own independent queue and the phone can be off and you'll still receive messages on the desktop client.
I would also state that it is unfair to compare an app that doesn't have to worry about your privacy and solving real engineering problems vs basically making a web app that can easily sync your data because it's all stored on someone else's computer.
If that's the level of privacy you're setting you may as well use email for communicating. It's federated, it's easy to use, and everybody has one.
All that said, I do agree the Signal desktop app needs some work, but they'll get there eventually, and in the meantime I don't have to wonder if any of my data will be leaked to anyone outside of my intended recipient.
Funny you say that because Signal is the one with a crappy Electron app which is definitely a deal breaker for me. I mean I lose E2E with Telegram but gain really well designed and featureful platform apps that are native and non-gimped desktop apps (and a functional linux client. Signal's Ubuntu client just crashed for me).
Good point. I use irc more than any other IM and nobody ever complained about lack of e2e there. When the usecase is more about meeting new people it doesn't apply as much.
Because at least according to the Threema devs, doing e2e multi device in a secure and anonymous way is not trivial.[1] Maybe matrix solved that problem, maybe they don't care...
I guess it depends what you need and what is "secure and anonymous". Matrix probably leaks a ton of metadata.
In practice it works by each device having their own encryption key and then those devices are bound together with a cross signing key, so your peer can robustly identify all your devices at once (and the list of devices can change as long as they are bound by the cross signing key). Certainly the server is able to correlate device ids (and thus keys) and IPs.
The way threema does it sounds a bit how room encryption works in Matrix amond multiple clients.
One thing to note about Telegram's secret chats is that they're device-specific. That is, if you start a conversation on your phone, you can't pick up that conversation on your laptop: https://telegram.org/faq#secret-chats
Hardly comparable in terms of usability. But then, WhatsApp isn't that good compared to Telegram either. In fact, I wouldn't use WhatsApp at all if various communities wouldn't host there group-chats I belong to. So I don't think usability has that much to do with your ability to switch. And supposed "security" has almost nothing to do with it whatsoever.
So I personally don't even know if I'll keep fighting for my privacy and stuff or if I'm going to give up now. I don't want to, but I honestly don't imagine how on Feb08 I will be telling people who aren't my close friends or co-workers, but communication with whom is really valuable to me, that I refuse to join any WhatsApp group chats anymore, so they will have to notify me about anything important (important to me, in he first place!) personally via SMS, Telegram, email, whatever. Especially now, when people are forced to communicate remotely and stuff gets cancelled/renewed/delayed because of another round of idiotic government regulations, so if I'll fall out of these communities, I'm pretty much left in the vacuum and won't know about anything that happens.
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.
Yes it is, because you can't join two servers at the same time. You run your own server, I run mine and we can't communicate until one of us decides to drop our whole network and join the other server.
That's fine. As I mentioned, the use case you are talking about makes this pointless.
Someone that needs a special set of phones to be able to communicate securely and not be reliant on a publicly run server? Here's a non pointless use case.
I'll let imagine who might run something like that.
Users want centralized services. Syncing across devices and shared history are mandatory features, and are basically impossible to do well in distributed models.
I have never lost a matrix message (but I am fed up with e2e warning and new session weird insecure messages) but I have come to the conclusion than Signal isn't reliable since it sometimes lose messages. It's no-no.
Yeah the e2e is way too complex in matrix. They really need to work on the UX and make it more like WA and Signal. The way it is now even a crypto geek like me gets annoyed and that means the mainstream will never touch it.
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
You can donate to Signal too. What has to happen until people realize they should be willing to pay a little money for a service?
We've actually witnessed that people _are_ willing to pay for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix after a long time of illegal torrents. How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?
People were willing to pay for WhatsApp. It was exactly that simple, honest, high quality independent paid chat app you are alluding to, back in 2010 or so.
> How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?
We can't, because those two things are in direct opposition. Piracy was less convenient and offered fewer features that people wanted, so they moved to platforms that were more convenient. The current giants (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp...) are more convenient than their alternatives (generic email, Mastodon, Signal...) and so the pressure is not to move, but in fact to stay.
In general, the pressure is always decentralised->centralised, which is exactly what torrents->Netflix was. Even if we had infinite funds to offer people distributed services for free forever, we would still need to make them more convenient than their current centralised ones - if on top of not being more convenient, we also want to charge them, I see no reason why the average person would ever want to switch.
I think part of the problem is the network effect. Social networks want to maximize the number of users so that anyone can connect to you on Facebook, Twitter, etc. The lowest barrier to entry is free, and that usually means ad supported (and personalized ads for the most revenue).
Maybe there's some space for a freemium model (IIRC one of the questions asked during the Facebook hearing was whether they could add a paid ad-free option) but so far that hasn't happened.
The motives could be many. While Wikipedia is a so called non-profit foundation it has its one biases and various groups use it to push various agendas including political agendas.
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.
Can you clarify what you mean by a "silo"? Do you mean once you start using Signal you're stuck in Signal, and you can't export all your messages into another app?
Last time I tried to use it it on my android didn't work without google play services. And they really bury the apk download, which means it's useless(or heavily discouraged) for people without a google account.
(Edit: this is rather a negative comment but its out of frustration -- I want to use it!)
That page also states "Advanced users with special needs can download the Signal APK directly. Most users should not do this under normal circumstances." which IMO is a very good point. Downloading random APKs from the internet is rarely a good idea...
Yeah you can search for it but it's not obvious from the site. I just think it's a shame that it's touted as open source but they don't appear to have given much thought to the open source demographic. It's not on f-droid.
They have given it thought, and have purposely decided not to distribute it through f-droid [0]. Yes you have to search for it, but if you are savvy enough to use un-googled android, you will be likely able to find it.
Getting people off of WhatsApp onto Signal means taking power away from a closed platform that makes billions from manipulating its users, which is already a win. Signal is not only not that, but is in fact a completely open non-profit project, so it's basically impossible for it to turn into that.
Even moving from Fb to Telegram is an improvement in almost all respects and it's sure as hell a lot easier to do than going straight to Matrix/Riot/whatever it is these days. Don't be a purist and let people have their compromises, lest you end up like the "GNU/" part in front of "Linux".
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 make a new account again. Having more control over your data stored by Facebook would give more power to the users of enforced by the government.
In many countries, WhatsApp equals texting, period. No one will use sms, among other things because they're not free (~20 cents per message, character limited, no multimedia).
The reality is that WhatsApp is a requirement for social life. Any solution that doesn't start from that point lacks any practicality.
Or realize the overwhelming majority have no interest in limiting their communication and social network due to "privacy concerns", and already have both a Facebook and Whatsapp account that are connected and sharing data. You can do this if you want, but don't preach it as if most people should care.
Most people in the UK use WhatsApp .. the fact that we have WhatsApp groups means Facebook can make this ultimatum with fairly good confidence we'll stomach it.
It strongly depends on what state of life you are currently at. If you are a 20 something individual and have to build a new life in a new city, being out of the "social apps" gives you next to no opportunities to build social connections.
If you are already well connected with your peers and friends and your social life doesn't depend on finding and exploring via the "social apps" sure you have the freedom to disconnect virtually and still remain connected socially.
On that note, if my family isn't willing to install another application and spend 5 minutes wrapping their head around how to use it - well, I guess I just accurately defined the value of our relationship.
If you're not in one of those countries, then I don't think you can speak for what a social life there is.
If I tell people they can only contact me via snail mail or in person (i.e. not have a phone at all), would you find it surprising that I will have a lot less of a social life?
Even 15 years ago I knew people in countries who had a difficult social life because they refused to use SMS - this was before the era of smart phones.
> HTTPs works with email, email works over data networks.
A lot of younger folks do not use email except for signing up for stuff and official work. When I left university a decade ago, many incoming freshmen were quite upset at the requirement to use email.
You can always have some social life, but in certain locales and circles, whether you use these apps or not will affect what type of social life you'll have.
> Acquiesce and nothing changes.
Sorry, but these types of statements are usually of little value, and only sound good. I could easily write:
Resist and nothing changes.
And it will likely be as true (and similarly lacking in entropy) as yours.
Thats fine. You can just accept that facebook is essential to the social life of your country, that the facebook eula is defacto legislation that you just obey. On the other hand, Signal works. My friends and I use it every day. We have not surendered, nor shall we.
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.
It's not so much the stage of life, it's that these technologies have become the de facto standard way of interacting in today's younger part of the population.
In other words: even though cell phones and social media were around when I was younger, they didn't play the central role they do today, so presumably it was much easier for me to do without them and still have a normal social life than it would be today.
Here's a sad thought experiment though: if you can only remain an active part of your circle of friends if you use the same technology as they do, what does that say about the depth of that friendship?
Network effects are real. Financially independent adults can choose their friends among a large pool of candidates. Kids, broke college students, and those generally less well off may have fewer options.
The flaw in that way of thinking is that kids, broke college students, and those generally less well off had no social life or network before social media.
True, but that was because no one had social media. Now that a big majority of people have it and interact over it, if you don't have it the chances of being marginalized are higher.
When everyone was using SMSes to chat, how did the kid that did not have a phone felt?
And people were social before phones existes too.
I think that being outside of the main mean of communication is going to have an impact on your social life, independently of what the medium is
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.
There you have it. Class of 1950 uses letters to organize itself. Class of 2000 uses e-mail. Class of 2010 uses Facebook. Class of 2020 uses Tiktok or idk snapchat.
And this issue isn't just about your class, it also includes any peer group of any kind. For me as a 20s something, the choice is quite binary.
Nowadays you can't even participate in free software communities without using proprietary services. Many free software projects have discords instead of community run matrix or IRC instances.
While I agree with this 90% of the way, their backup, restore, and phone changing process is very much "tech for tech people".
I've had the joy of trying to explain to my elderly dad why his text message history is lost because he chose Signal as the default sms system, didn't make a backup, didn't sync that backup to the cloud or manually copy it to the new phone, and didn't write down the very long decryption code.
I really don't understand why Signal doesn't just keep a encrypted backup in Google Drive/iCloud. This seems like such a solved problem and yet they instead invented their own Bluetooth sync thing for iOS and manually copying files around for Android.
I'm hoping it will get there eventually. The backup mechanism on Android has improved a fair bit from what it was at the start. It used to be that you had to have the backup file in the correct magic path before starting Signal for the first time. Now at least there is a dialog and you can pick the file whenever.
The usability issues for non-tech people have been getting less and less in the past years which is keeping my hopes up.
Agreed. I understand they are reticent to allow backups for security reasons - but they're treating their users like idiots by doing this. Some people will have threat models where the ability to retain/export messages is worth the risk this may introduce. Let people make their own decisions.
Convenience vs Security - Pretty much any change made at the behest of convenience is at the expense of security. Honestly, once every 2 years having to move some files around...well, if that's the barrier that people aren't willing to push past, then we're pretty much screwed from the start.
If seesawtron won't go to the trouble of using WhatsApp (an alternate way than Signal) of getting in touch with his friends, is seesawtron really their friend?
Whatsapp is used (at least here in the EU) for a lot more than staying in touch with your friends. E.g. having a young kid, it's used for: the class' group, arranging playdates, etc. Not using Whatsapp makes it much harder to arrange your social life and that of your kids.
Then there are also many organizations/companies that use Whatsapp to set appointments, for chat support, etc.
In many EU countries Whatsapp is pretty much replaced SMS. Only a small minority of folks have Signal or Telegram. iMessage is probably the only other thing that shows as a blip on the radar, but only a portion of the population has iDevices.
I agree that this is a bad situation, but WhatsApp became popular when it was still independent and their profit model was charging 1 Euro per year (which was much cheaper than SMS). Now abandoning Whatsapp is difficult due to network effects.
“Open source” is sold to the people as “you have the most control”, but in reality once your data reaches their end, you have no idea what is deal with it.
Open source centralized solution does not an will not solve the problem. They can not.
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.
Ah true, for US users it would be a lot higher. Seems to be around $10 billion per quarter of revenue for US and Canada[1], which means around 15 per user (for around 250 million users[2]. You weren't that far off! That's definitely a lot more than what the gut feeling I had was (which is why I just googled the first stat that seemed to align with my hunch - classic mistake).
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).
Only difference is that we've learned that third-party ad placements are much lower quality and barely worth the ad spend. YouTube ads are highly valuable since they're effectively first-party and will offer high(er) assurances of whether clicks are legitimate. And, as mentioned below, people willing to pay for YT Premium are probably more valuable than the average viewer.
80% of population is worth $5 and 20% is worth $30 ; but all of the YT premium subscriber are from the 20%, so despite the average only being $10, offering it for less than $30 will lose money.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 771 ms ] threadI created a new burner FB account (I don't use FB) to go with my Quest 2.
I used a fake name and a gmail burner account.
However I've had to enter my credit card details to make payments so they have my real name, bank details and address information. They also know what I'm watching, what I'm buying etc
So my question is - do they call me out at some point and tell me to add a real name or prove my ID. Or do they let me carry on under my burner account because they can still profit from me both from my spend on apps/games and by selling my real data?
(The only way to win is to not play the game...)
I am thankful that I made the decision early on to use steam for purchases early on.
I no longer have an oculus HMD, but Oculus no longer has any profit from me.
lol. whatsapp
I like what Matrix is doing but they are far away from becoming mainstream. Within 2-3 years a new platform will rise and it will fix flaws of existing messaging apps. This will then be followed by social media but it might take another 6-7 years to fix that mess.
My friends from Europe and Brazil are locked into WhatsApp, my American friends seem to prefer FB messenger. They’re really using 2 versions of the same company’s products which are “incompatible” at this point. Facebook could make them compatible with one another and with each other only OR they could do the socially beneficially thing and use an open protocol. Unless employees at FB push for this, they’re likely to take the former route.
And then 2-3 years after that an entirely incompatible platform will do the same thing...
When smartphones came out people modified IRC with support for push brokers and message replay but because of app stores this means push brokers for community maintained clients have to be maintained by the individual volunteer paying (yes! paying, shut up about the free dev accounts they don't allow you to send push notifications) for the "privilege" of submitting the app (meaning they have low to zero availability.) The relay Mozilla maintains allows servers and users to choose who brokers push messages but Apple and Google screw over their users for profit and this is the result.
Smartphone app stores have made IM unusable.
Moving to a different walled garden is not a solution.
Then came the question - can we talk to people on whatsapp using signal because friends, aunts, uncles, cousins who live international all live on whatsapp. Moving your network, their network and their networks network becomes quite the task.
People, in general, don't have a qualm about installing another app when it's recommended by someone they trust.
https://epic.org/privacy/internet/ftc/whatsapp/
Also your virtual bet is lost because every time my circle discusses ‘hot’ topics in telegram (company issues, lawyer/audit-related chats, recreational drug use, etc), we go secret and warn users who do otherwise. We can’t check whether that is common or not, because those who have to be ‘secret’ may resist to admit this activity.
I have not used Telegram though, so that’s not a preference based on usability, just on trust.
Also, FYI, Telegram is going to introduce some paid features soon, but it's not completely clear what they'll be. There just was some talking about that's it about the time they are going to monetize it, but I'm not sure if they announced what exactly becomes paid and what doesn't.
Everyone on HN switches between “ads don’t work and targeting is BS” to “ads are manipulating our entire country by taking our data”
> There are lots of contradictions in people’s strongly held beliefs. Someone might preach self-sufficiency in politics, but coddle their children. An individual might oppose abortion on the grounds that human life is sacred and may still support the death penalty for convicted murders. A person might argue for the freedom of individual expression in the arts but want hateful speech to be regulated.
from https://www.fastcompany.com/3067169/how-your-brain-makes-you...
I think ads can work, but don't in many cases (based on recent stories that cancelling certain kinds of ad spend has no effect on outcomes). In some cases, like Uber advertising to get users, this seems entirely plausible.
So I largely think ads themselves are kind of harmless. But ad-backed business models are dangerous, because they optimize for "engagement", which tends to promote content that is divisive over more thoughtful, nuanced content. Sadly, it also seems to require gathering huge amounts of information about users in a centralized spot, which seems risky for a variety of reasons.
The whole thing reminds me of a call I got about 10 years ago to participate in a survey about smoking, and one of the questions they asked was "Do you believe nicotine causes cancer?" I paused because my understanding is that nicotine itself doesn't cause cancer, but the common delivery mechanisms at the time (smoking, dipping) do increase the risk of cancer. They forced me to answer yes/no, so I said "no", but obviously a decade later, I still remember it. Do ads cause harm? Probably not much, taken on their own. But everything _around_ them seems to.
I have had smart, educated people say "I got an iphone so I wouldn't be left out of group chats". Because downloading an app is too much work. I'm not sure how asking people to take 5 seconds to do something to improve their life and society became such a taboo.
That’s added at least 20 or 30 friends/acquaintances into my signal contact list that I’m 99% sure downloaded signal for the first time this morning.
In Brazil we hurry to turn off the call if it goes into voicemail, as we pay to leave a message AND nobody listens to them because it costs a lot to listen (or at least used to).
Did you know that MMS can transmit slideshows[1]? I didn't, until my father somehow sent me one. The UI that Android has for that is — naturally — a complete afterthought. (No way to pause the slideshow, no way to navigate the slides, nothing. Just one run through the animation at Warp 8.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
I don't know how many of the new Signal users will stay (there's already discussion in one of the new Signal groups about "Why aren't we using Telegram instead?")
Same as much of this thread - these people are not concerned much at all about encryption details, they're largely a pissed of mob of people departing WhatsApp. And some of them are already saying "there's no web client! I can't use this!!!"
I suspect I may well end up back being "the guy who's not part of most group chats" if/when they decide Signal isn't for them... And I'm OK with that.
My impression is the US/Canada are one of the only places where SMS is still frequently used for casual text communication and i'm horrified that Apple's iMessage is the one to somewhat challenge that.
iMessage is only for Apple devices.
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 reputation by pushing that too hard.
I call my family for 1 cent per minute.
You can use Google Duo to make voice or video calls for (other than data costs) free, Google hangouts also has voice-only plus video options and of course Google voice integrates with the classic telephone network and has cheap international rates.
Google Fi has free calling from the US to over 50 countries and otherwise their plans start at one cents a minute depending on destination. https://fi.google.com/about/unlimited-calling/
Most of my friends from Asia tell me WhatsApp was and is popular because it carried voice over data, bypassing the PSTN which apparently has very high per-minute rates.
If you want to go slightly higher tech there are telepresence appliances like 8x8, Amazon or Google IOT devices or you can just use sip phones and call between the devices free of charge using your own pbx software or a free service like Callcentric's IP Freedom plan.
There a million options that either let you opt out of Facebook's data collection and trade it for Google's, or just opt out entirely.
Don't get the subscription, pay as you go with Skype credit.
Edit: sometimes I also start with an audio call, but midway there's something I want to show them, so we switch to video by just pressing 1 button.
All of which is completely unacceptable in 2021 for a product meant for a large audience. Messaging is integral to people's lives, to the point where people keep 10+ year old phones because they have messages on them from people that passed away and they can't figure out how to move the messages across or to a new system. As much as it pains me to say, there just aren't any production quality alternatives to WhatsApp that can take over. And don't even get me started on Element/Matrix...
And normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default. Are you using end-to-end encrypted chats with your contacts?
As for converting people who are not that interested, I can tell you from experience talking about privacy generally doesn't sell it.
For end2end you can just use the secret chat function.. https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end
Feel free to check their source out - https://telegram.org/apps#source-code
So I'm not sure what 'bears repeating'.
Don't expect people to uninstall Whatsapp. Having multiple messengers is fine.
Then they got hooked up, mostly thanks to the huge amount of high quality stickers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25664130
The move can be made faster now because groups are so prevalent on WhatsApp.
To be honest, I'm not well versed in the debate of privacy, but invariably in discussing user tracking by BigCo's a lot of my friends just say "I don't care if they have my data, I've got nothing to hide."
An example in the first case is that you'll want to buy a secret gift for someone, but because of the tracking the surprise will be spoiled because they'll be seeing ads for it on their systems.
It's not a hard concept, and it's not just tech people who care about it. It doesn't require any knowledge of tech to understand.
On the other hand, she knows how to use FB messenger and my efforts to get her to switch to email/telegram have just caused confusion so far.
My apologies for the imposition if that’s not the case.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=j+edgar+hoover+blackmail
They call everything "a myth" and then cite strong circumstantial and testimonial evidence that those "myths" are true, only to dismiss everything with hand waving about how "we'll never know" what his extremely private and mysterious sex life was like. Give me a break.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/j-edgar-hoover-would-ha...
[1] https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/4823
when was cross-platform messaging ever new?
... IRC, AIM, etc ...
This is in relation to iMessage vs BBM vs whatever was popular on Android at the time.
(And they got on boarding, group functionality and UI better than anyone for a very long time)
Be the change you want to see in the world.
My wife recently got her entire extended family to use Signal. She has always refused to use WhatsApp. They all love Signal now, and use it all the time. However, this was during a family crisis.
During the Covid lockdowns, many companies I know used Signal as their preferred non corporate communication platform over WhatsApp... But again, that was a crisis.
It seems to be difficult to dislodge people from their preferred platforms without some kind of external driver to adopt it.
Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
That's my point. I hate systems that require a phone number, as they usually mean that I have a substandard experience when I'm not on my phone and I can't sign my children up so that we have a general chat tool.
The only option ends up being massively over the top team style chats like Rocketchat, Mattermost, Discord, or Slack. So we end up back on Hangouts.
A bit shit for general family conversation.
[Edit] If they do allow signing up/in with a username then I'll probably be all over it. That would be awesome news.
I'm unsure if they will allow signups without phone numbers, but they don't store that information. Signal doesn't have it. [0][1] It is very possible they go around this though.
[0] https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
[1] (time-stamped to only the important part) https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=894&v=Nj3YFprqAr8&feature=yo...
> they usually mean that I have a substandard experience when I'm not on my phone
> I can't sign my children up so that we have a general chat tool.
This isn't a privacy thing, this is a general tool that is fundimentally broken if I'm not on my phone.
I'm not always on my phone, and my kids don't have phone numbers.
They are unusable.
In my experience the desktop client is slow, buggy, and takes eons to start up. There's also no web version, making it awkward to use on computers other than your own.
I would be more willing to switch over to Signal if it wasn't so lacking in this regard.
No. Threema does not require a phone number (it uses one for the registration verification, but your account is not linked to that number).
I'd love to use signal with more people but that, and the ux around changing phones means I can't really recommend it to anyone but the most technical of my friends.
If the only way to reach you is to either install Signal or wait a year until the lockdowns are over, people install Signal.
I can only speak for why one company adopted Signal over WhatsApp, but the main reason was that the company did not want their communication metadata tracked by Facebook. They were regarded as equivalent in terms of E2E encryption and functionality.
EDIT: They also did not trust Facebook entirely not to break the E2E in some way (eg cloud backups or whatever), and the message contents had to remain secure. It wasn't a huge concern, but all else being equal, Signal was the better choice.
edit: mass downvote! here are the links.
this link talks specifically about signal protocol being used by organized crime https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/waarom-criminel...
https://www.securityweek.com/telegram-rivaling-tor-home-crim...
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/03/criminals-are-hi...
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
Neither could I find anything matching your second point that installing any of these messengers might make law enforcement suspect you to be a criminal.
My friends and family have mostly been using Signal for over a year and we never had such worry. I also know laywers, lawmakers, doctors and CEOs who are also using Signal for important communications.
https://opgelicht.avrotros.nl/uitzending/gemist/item/bericht... https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/criminelen-handelen-op-berichte... https://www.security.nl/posting/586026/Politie+kraakt+versle...
Here are links that show that WhatsApp is painted as a tool for pedophiles:
* https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/whatsapp-has...
* https://www.businessinsider.com/whatsapp-has-a-child-porn-pr...
* https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/
* https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/whatsapp-has-a-ch...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668659
-
Signal IS much better.
It's a nonprofit, not a commerical company.
There are arguments for and against centralized systems and forks of apps. The lead dev of Signal is concerned about interoperability; but still leaves users the option of doing things the way they would like with the open source code; it's just not 'supported™'
The key was being stubborn and banking on them eventually wanting to talk to me.
This. Same for me. I just put a message like this in the family whatsapp groups and then deleted the app/account: 'Hey everyone, I'm not going to be on WhatsApp anymore - you can call, text, signal, telegram or email me. Talk to you later!'. It was that simple. It took a little while but now my family is on Telegram. I know they still use WhatsApp but it's honestly not my problem or issue that they use the app - I just don't want to.
I know what you're asking, but I don't think there's a fix unless you somehow have tremendous influence with them. So you either put up with being coerced by your group, or you don't.
This is probably easier if you never used the services in the first place. My mom will occasionally whine that she has to open Imessage to talk to me, and that's about the extent of it. But of course, I am missing whatever they get up to on FB without me. And that's OK with me, but I know it isn't with everyone.
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.
Amongst many, many other factors, it's a nonprofit foundation, not a commercial company.
Long term, it has backing from people (like the original founders of Whatsapp) who want to see an open solution flourish. Plus people can donate.
Also, both the client and server are open source.
I was thinking about going back, actually, but using a separate phone number (dual SIM FTW) and a work profile sandbox with heavily restricted permissions. I might still give it a shot, see if that's enough to quell FB's insatiable hunger for personal data.
The main lock-ins for WhatsApp with my friends/family/colleagues are:
1. Group chats. SMS group chat doesn't exist (or it's next to unknown) in Australia.
2. Sharing images and videos. SMS destroys images/videos/gifs (if they even send).
3. International. Messaging friends/colleagues when they're overseas is easy.
4. Videochat (however, it's usually FaceTime with an older relative).
I attempted a shift to Telegram with a few close friends and family members. Eventually, we started to drop back to the "normal" comms route because our extended network was on WhatsApp/iMessage and juggling several methods was irritating (e.g you message a friend on Telegram and get no response -- they then message you later that day on WhatsApp -- it's irritating to move the conversation back to Telegram).
- SMS is not encrypted.
- SMS supports text only. MMS is not well supported, and often not free.
- SMS is sometimes not as "instant" as it can be delayed.
- Delivery reports and, read receipts are not user-friendly, and maybe unreliable, too.
- Group SMS support depends on your default SMS app.
RCS or Rich Communication Service on 4g and 5g looks to fix this, but support and compatibility between network is still lacking. Privacy laws also need a reevaluation as even cellular providers are looking to data harvesting to make more money and RCS may also lack encryption support.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc...
- e2e encryption
- many extra chat features (reactions, stickers, replies, polls, etc). It might seem unnecessary but imo they do genuinely increase functionality and ease of communication
- scalable to large groups (maybe sms is as well, I've never tried more than 3-4 people)
- don't need a phone, can message from a computer instead
- messages sync across multiple devices
- video calling for groups with some apps
Nobody picks free texts. This leaves 15c/message as a discouragement for using SMS.
We are all running what most would consider an outdated and poorly designed c.p.u. architecture by modern standards, simply because most software is not compiled to run on other architectures, and it won't be until those architectures see significant adoption.
I just dropped the link in the title into all the group chats I'm in, said I'm headed to signal and removed myself from the groups.
I was not the first person to do that in these groups. Will it cause a critical mass exodus? Idk. I won't know, I won't be back.
That's one reason with I prefer Matrix/Element...
App is going in February though.
Then it turned out that they have a setting where one can opt out, but what good is that if you already were opted in automatically.
In "Last Seen & Online" I had a deleted account in the exceptions of those who can always see my status, even though I never added one.
Telegram may be better than WhatsApp, but it is far from fantastic.
Yep: just checked. Nothing more I can do to increase privacy settings. Zero confidence in it after that
So I just use email.
I just wish they would keep all their WhatsApp stuff away from me.
If someone refuses to make an actual call, text me, email me, or use Signal, then clearly they don't respect me enough for me to need to communicate with them.
I don't know whom was not respecting whom, but I didn't feel really respected either, despite respecting each guy wishes.
In my friends circle we are all on telegram (after trying wire which is just buggy as hell), but I think this is mainly due to its multi device story and then fact that it is not WhatsApp.
So tldr target the people you want to convert to develop a critical mass.
Signal is much harder to sell to non-tech users IMHO.
I refuse to help walled gardens get bigger. It has cost me a lot of contacts, but so be it. There is always a choice.
If you had a friend you respected that was vegan for ethical or environmental convictions would you insist on continuing to exclusively have social gatherings at BBQ restaurants with no menu options for them? Would you take them seriously if they caved to avoid being excluded from the group?
When I deleted all walled garden messengers by Google, Facebook etc they knew I wasn't kidding. Anyone that refuses to make small allowances for you living your convictions is not your friend.
The people that need to talk to me use matrix now or found other ways to reach out like e-mail or in person. Those that don't respect my ethics don't get free advice from me anymore.
Social technologies would benefit from some regulation along the lines of “you must be able to use other apps to send to/receive from your app” for at least a minimal feature set, but it would be super hard to nail down what that regulation should exactly be.
That's a neat trick, but not as neat as Signal's "sure, here's all the data we have - the time and ip address of their last use."
(I'm sure a bunch of the "better UX, UI, and features" people like in Telegram rely on them storing more data on their servers, so that comes down to a privacy/convenience tradeoff, which as others have pointed out almost always comes down on the convenience side for 99.99% of people...)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-sign...
“Today, Facebook does not use your WhatsApp account information to improve your Facebook product experiences or provide you more relevant Facebook ad experiences on Facebook.“
"Today, I've not murdered you yet! Look at that accomplishment I've made!"
Someone else with more info could explain better?
Whatever WhatsApp/Facebook do to “take care” of the “customers” is just like pig farmers taking care of pigs.
_______
>WhatsApp, according to the App Store, reserves the right to collect:
Purchases
Financial information
Location
Contacts
User content
Identifiers
Usage data and
Diagnostics
Except default E2E (which WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, Threema etc. do provide).
I use Signal with tech friends, and Telegram with family/non-tech friends. I feel like the latter using Telegram is still better than them using WhatsApp, so I’ll take what I can get.
Jumping out of the Facebook frypan into the Salesforce fire doesn't seem to be a particularly winning move...
(Which also raises the question, whichever alternative you choose, you probably need to evaluate the risk of Facebook (or some equally evil corp) acquiring them down the track. I wonder how likely Discord/Telegram/Signal are to be able to resist Facebook-sized acquisition offers?)
[0] https://signal.org/en/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p...
[2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog...
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
Ever heard the first rule of encryption? "Never roll your own crypto". Well they broke the rule and they won't let anyone check if the crypto is secure or not.
Not to mention encryption is off by default and your plaintext messages are stored on their servers...
https://telegram.org/privacy#3-3-your-messages https://telegram.org/privacy#4-1-storing-data
They have the encryption key, so the difference is not huge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03141
It tries to have feature-parity to WhatsApp; looks the same, works the same. All this while researching innovations on cryptography that doesn't compromise user experience too much.
In my experience, doing exactly what WhatsApp does (but safer) makes it an easy sell to people around me.
Other than that it's definitely a great alternative.
In other words, Telegram doesn't even deserve to be in the same conversation. Even if it had the best encryption out there (however you define that), that wouldn't mean anything when it's not used in like 98% of the cases (percentage pulled out of my ass).
It's like comparing Signal to Facebook's Messenger, and I'd still say Messenger over Telegram because at least it uses Signal's protocol under the hood (I believe the feature is called hidden conversations) instead of inventing its own thing and ignoring the expert opinions.
Granted I've never used WhatsApp, but I've been using Signal for like 5 years now on my phone and on my laptop with absolutely no issues.
WhatsApp is a total joke, it loses media (IIRC this includes audio messages as well) people send you after a very short time even when you use it on a single device, so talking about multi-device usage is completely out of the overton window.
(for any sensible definition of multi-device)
Meanwhile, the Telegram desktop client is at feature-parity with the phone app with both running entirely independently on as many devices as you want.
I would also state that it is unfair to compare an app that doesn't have to worry about your privacy and solving real engineering problems vs basically making a web app that can easily sync your data because it's all stored on someone else's computer.
If that's the level of privacy you're setting you may as well use email for communicating. It's federated, it's easy to use, and everybody has one.
All that said, I do agree the Signal desktop app needs some work, but they'll get there eventually, and in the meantime I don't have to wonder if any of my data will be leaked to anyone outside of my intended recipient.
Funny you say that because Signal is the one with a crappy Electron app which is definitely a deal breaker for me. I mean I lose E2E with Telegram but gain really well designed and featureful platform apps that are native and non-gimped desktop apps (and a functional linux client. Signal's Ubuntu client just crashed for me).
[1] https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/md-architectural-overview-i...
In practice it works by each device having their own encryption key and then those devices are bound together with a cross signing key, so your peer can robustly identify all your devices at once (and the list of devices can change as long as they are bound by the cross signing key). Certainly the server is able to correlate device ids (and thus keys) and IPs.
The way threema does it sounds a bit how room encryption works in Matrix amond multiple clients.
So I personally don't even know if I'll keep fighting for my privacy and stuff or if I'm going to give up now. I don't want to, but I honestly don't imagine how on Feb08 I will be telling people who aren't my close friends or co-workers, but communication with whom is really valuable to me, that I refuse to join any WhatsApp group chats anymore, so they will have to notify me about anything important (important to me, in he first place!) personally via SMS, Telegram, email, whatever. Especially now, when people are forced to communicate remotely and stuff gets cancelled/renewed/delayed because of another round of idiotic government regulations, so if I'll fall out of these communities, I'm pretty much left in the vacuum and won't know about anything that happens.
Telegram's backend is closed-source.
Someone that needs a special set of phones to be able to communicate securely and not be reliant on a publicly run server? Here's a non pointless use case.
I'll let imagine who might run something like that.
Don't get me wrong, I love Riot (or whatever it's called these days) but it's just not user-friendly for your average Joe...
We've actually witnessed that people _are_ willing to pay for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix after a long time of illegal torrents. How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?
I remember vaguely getting convinced by a friend, "you just payed [200,300,idk]€ for that new phone, can't pay one euro for this one app?"
We can't, because those two things are in direct opposition. Piracy was less convenient and offered fewer features that people wanted, so they moved to platforms that were more convenient. The current giants (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp...) are more convenient than their alternatives (generic email, Mastodon, Signal...) and so the pressure is not to move, but in fact to stay.
In general, the pressure is always decentralised->centralised, which is exactly what torrents->Netflix was. Even if we had infinite funds to offer people distributed services for free forever, we would still need to make them more convenient than their current centralised ones - if on top of not being more convenient, we also want to charge them, I see no reason why the average person would ever want to switch.
Maybe there's some space for a freemium model (IIRC one of the questions asked during the Facebook hearing was whether they could add a paid ad-free option) but so far that hasn't happened.
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.
https://matrix.org/clients/
And unlike Signal, you can host your own server (Synapse) instance and be truely independent with the ability to join the federated network.
(Edit: this is rather a negative comment but its out of frustration -- I want to use it!)
That page also states "Advanced users with special needs can download the Signal APK directly. Most users should not do this under normal circumstances." which IMO is a very good point. Downloading random APKs from the internet is rarely a good idea...
0. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9044#issu...
EDIT: To the people downvoting this: I said the same thing a long time ago about whatsapp before Facebook bought them.
However I'd also promote federation-first services like Matrix. Only issue with Matrix is the e2e being so clumsy IMO
Even moving from Fb to Telegram is an improvement in almost all respects and it's sure as hell a lot easier to do than going straight to Matrix/Riot/whatever it is these days. Don't be a purist and let people have their compromises, lest you end up like the "GNU/" part in front of "Linux".
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 make a new account again. Having more control over your data stored by Facebook would give more power to the users of enforced by the government.
They’re for aggregate metrics and attention collecting on the part of the company.
I do not have a Facebook empire, Twitter, TikTok or other social media presence.
I email academics I can’t visit.
I group text friends and family to make plans, and use the calendar built into my phone to remind myself of those events.
The reality is that WhatsApp is a requirement for social life. Any solution that doesn't start from that point lacks any practicality.
I get social inertia is a thing.
Somehow I’ve blown it off and life still works.
Summarizing it as “life begins and ends with WhatsApp” seems just as ridiculous to me.
Acquiesce and nothing changes.
Turn and face the strange.
If you are already well connected with your peers and friends and your social life doesn't depend on finding and exploring via the "social apps" sure you have the freedom to disconnect virtually and still remain connected socially.
All my family members live in a different country and there is no good medium for communication than whatsapp.
Spike on iOS is a client that wraps email in a chat like UI if the people are free to chat real time. Not sure if it’s on Android.
There a numerous video chat sites not connected to Zoom, or FB properties
whereby, etc
I gave my family an ultimatum and being the tech savvy one they jumped to Signal
Social inertia is a thing conceptually, but it’s not gravity. It can be bent any which way
Not all families respond well to ultimatums.
While that is true, what you have not accurately determined is why that value is low, and how much of that is your doing vs theirs.
If you're not in one of those countries, then I don't think you can speak for what a social life there is.
If I tell people they can only contact me via snail mail or in person (i.e. not have a phone at all), would you find it surprising that I will have a lot less of a social life?
Even 15 years ago I knew people in countries who had a difficult social life because they refused to use SMS - this was before the era of smart phones.
> HTTPs works with email, email works over data networks.
A lot of younger folks do not use email except for signing up for stuff and official work. When I left university a decade ago, many incoming freshmen were quite upset at the requirement to use email.
You can always have some social life, but in certain locales and circles, whether you use these apps or not will affect what type of social life you'll have.
> Acquiesce and nothing changes.
Sorry, but these types of statements are usually of little value, and only sound good. I could easily write:
Resist and nothing changes.
And it will likely be as true (and similarly lacking in entropy) as yours.
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.
In other words: even though cell phones and social media were around when I was younger, they didn't play the central role they do today, so presumably it was much easier for me to do without them and still have a normal social life than it would be today.
Here's a sad thought experiment though: if you can only remain an active part of your circle of friends if you use the same technology as they do, what does that say about the depth of that friendship?
When everyone was using SMSes to chat, how did the kid that did not have a phone felt? And people were social before phones existes too.
I think that being outside of the main mean of communication is going to have an impact on your social life, independently of what the medium is
There you have it. Class of 1950 uses letters to organize itself. Class of 2000 uses e-mail. Class of 2010 uses Facebook. Class of 2020 uses Tiktok or idk snapchat.
And this issue isn't just about your class, it also includes any peer group of any kind. For me as a 20s something, the choice is quite binary.
Nowadays you can't even participate in free software communities without using proprietary services. Many free software projects have discords instead of community run matrix or IRC instances.
Hey, I might be old, but I still live nowadays too!
I've had the joy of trying to explain to my elderly dad why his text message history is lost because he chose Signal as the default sms system, didn't make a backup, didn't sync that backup to the cloud or manually copy it to the new phone, and didn't write down the very long decryption code.
The usability issues for non-tech people have been getting less and less in the past years which is keeping my hopes up.
If people won’t go to the trouble of using an alternate way of getting in touch with you then they’re not really your friends.
If people won’t go to the trouble of using your preferred method of getting in touch with you then you don't have enough social clout.
Then there are also many organizations/companies that use Whatsapp to set appointments, for chat support, etc.
In many EU countries Whatsapp is pretty much replaced SMS. Only a small minority of folks have Signal or Telegram. iMessage is probably the only other thing that shows as a blip on the radar, but only a portion of the population has iDevices.
I agree that this is a bad situation, but WhatsApp became popular when it was still independent and their profit model was charging 1 Euro per year (which was much cheaper than SMS). Now abandoning Whatsapp is difficult due to network effects.
Make it happen.
Be the change you want to see.
[0]: https://threema.ch/en/open-source
Forget whether or not they can, legally; if I recall correctly they explicitly promised not to.
People who work for those without integrity are baffling to me.
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.
Is it per year? Per Quarter? Not clear to me.
But yeah, definitely not per month, but also much higher than the $1/year the GP is offering.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/223280/facebooks-quarter... 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... + ~20 for canada
(E: 12, not 18. 18 is for families)
0: https://YouTube.com/premium
If I make $1/mo/per user from adverts, but my conversion rate is 1/12 at $12/mo, then I'm making $23 for every 12 users.
Doesn't mean I make $12/user/month.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858
What does it mean in a context?
80% of population is worth $5 and 20% is worth $30 ; but all of the YT premium subscriber are from the 20%, so despite the average only being $10, offering it for less than $30 will lose money.
Maybe in the US they might get that per user, but not worldwide.
And I’d pay $5,000 for a new Tesla. Though I have no idea why someone would sell me one for so cheap.