1. Sharing data
We never share your data with anyone. No.
Just use Signal Messager.
Just use XMPP.
(^) Granted, moxie can be considered a crypto expert, and the design got some public auditing.
The Guardian Project writes a bunch of nice software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian_Project_(software...
It’s actually usable, supports a lot more encryption methods, is more up to date, and actually looks okay.
At the end of the day, all these guys get enough users and then the users are just too tied to the platform to make an easy move.
If you had actually used both, it would be clear why people use Telegram over Signal.
Signal doesn't even have a desktop client for any OS!
- https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...
The 'share information with Facebook' nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends.
Then, once you've agreed to the terms and conditions, you've got a completely arbitrary 30 days to read an online article which tells you what you've signed up for before WhatsApp is irrevocably sharing your data with Facebook.
You can build an incredibly accurate picture of people's lives from metadata alone - WhatsApp know it and Facebook know it.
Not only that - when WhatsApp start building out these 'brand' relationships which will look a lot like helpful information at first - you'll be loading your data into that brand's custom FB audience too. And you won't have an opt out because, y'know, reasons.
This is very obviously not the WhatsApp that promised not to fuck with its users when Facebook bought it out.
Chances are, doing this will get you kicked off Facebook and deleted pretty quickly. And if it doesn't, you've just fucked with not just Facebook, but all their advertisers. GIGO.
It used to be more difficult: I remember following the process you're describing for some other account I had. It might still be that difficult in some cases, I don't know.
I suspect that you'd be familiar with LinkedIn dark patterns [0] too.
[0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
Not just that, but even if your number is not shared with Facebook, but Facebook knows that ten of your friends all contact you three times a week, you're still in the graph even if you're not personally receiving advertising.
Fuck facebook a thousand times over.
Facebook had a leak ~3 years ago that showed it: http://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-sh... but there have been darker efforts to do this since at least 2006 or so that I've found.
Since Faceook is using cookies and is able to read your data from other websites than FB alone, can you please fix your sentence to read this:
> if you don't want your personal information to be shared, don't use internet. period.
Sure, you can still e-mail, call, sms or heck, even visit your friends and family IRL. But not having a social media account sure makes it more inconvenient. All your friends use these networks.
In a couple of years not having a social media account will be seen as equivalent to not having a bank account, or a passport, or a phone number. Sure, it's possible to live like that. But it sure is inconvenient.
Aside from that, as others have mentioned in this thread, even if you don't have an account Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. have your data already. You can be sure one of your friends has uploaded their contacts to WhatsApp, including your phone number and mail address. Facebook has detected your face in a photograph your cousin uploaded. Google has all of your self-hosted mails because all of your friends use Gmail.
If you don't want your personal information to be shared, you need to live like a hermit.
* You have to enter a credit card number to begin the 'free trial', for a 'seamless experience' (ie. so we can bill you if you forget to cancel).
* You have to cancel your free trial 1 day or more before the end of the trial period to avoid being billed for the next month (at least I hope it's "1 day or more" and not "exactly 1 day"... the exact wording is "If you wish to avoid being charged for your free trial, you must cancel the trial one day prior to the auto-renewal.")
* You can't then delete your payment method at the same time, and must remember to do so after the end of the billing cycle.
Or as former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency., Gen. Michael Hayden, said :
"We kill people based on metadata"
Exactly my point, when whatsapp was bought, they said all these things, that whatsapp doesn't sell out customer information, that whatsapp will never have calling facility because they want to focus on texting alone.
I think they should remove the "why we do not sell ads" too, there is no point in this two faced behaviour.
The NSA knows it too
/grump
The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber >:(
Can anybody recommend XMPP servers? I know duckduckgo has an XMPP service up and running, but I can't seem to find any relevant API documentation. All I found was this [0], which doesn't go into details about encryption settings and isn't very useful for programmatic interaction.
[0] https://duck.co/blog/post/2/using-pidgin-with-xmpp-jabber
Extensions that implement server-side XEPs are really easy to add on as well. Just git pull the community XEP repo and then add a line to the ini and you can add more superpowers. I have it on a cheap VPS. I'm using conversations with it and it has been mostly flawless. Now I just need a good linux application that understands OMEMO. There's a Gajim hack, but it's kind of messy.
[0]: https://prosody.im/
Never took off in developed world but I strangely got plenty of users in Iran & middle east
However, clearly people prefer to use other systems, such as Whatsapp. They offered something different (and simple) enough that it enticed people to use it, and so they have the users. It would appear that people just don't care enough about interoperability to switch to something else.
IRC is still alive, at least.
I'm missing something here; why is this a bad thing?
in the early days both worked with external clients/servers too.
This is what annoys me the most. I can't control what people put in their address book about me (physical address, email, photo, phone number, maybe even more infos) and who they share my info with.
then you can safely share your 'normal' contacts with Whatsapp.
'The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.'
Device & app history
retrieve running apps
Identity
find accounts on the device
add or remove accounts
read your own contact card
Calendar
read calendar events plus confidential information
add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge
Contacts
find accounts on the device
read your contacts
modify your contacts
Location
approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)
SMS
read your text messages (SMS or MMS)
Phone
directly call phone numbers
read call log
read phone status and identity
write call log
Photos/Media/Files
read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
Storage
read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
Camera
take pictures and videos
Microphone
record audio
Wi-Fi connection information
view Wi-Fi connections
Device ID & call information
read phone status and identity
Other
download files without notification
adjust your wallpaper size
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
read battery statistics
send sticky broadcast
change network connectivity
connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
expand/collapse status bar
full network access
change your audio settings
read sync settings
run at startup
reorder running apps
set wallpaper
draw over other apps
control vibration
prevent device from sleeping
toggle sync on and off
install shortcuts
read Google service configurationQuote from the announcement (https://blog.whatsapp.com/499/Facebook):
> And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.
Today's announcement (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37184651):
> The updated privacy policy also paves the way for businesses to send messages to WhatsApp users.
Facebook has used their market dominance to restrict competition so we can't avoid advertising. I'm not normally one to get angry and start waving pitchforks, but for me, this is clearly an abuse of their monopoly.
False alarm!
They would seem to be doing all the right things, such as OTR and not rolling their own protocols, but I've only been able to find a couple of opinions and nothing concrete.
The fact that they've made effort to open source it and are letting people write their own clients for it is encouraging, but not proof that it's a solid system.
To avoid confusion about axolotl ratchet and its usage, OpenWhisperSystems changed the name of the protocol used to Signal protocol in March. [1]
However, I am afraid I won't be able to convince anyone to use it :(
But it's kinda scary that emperor Zuck has so much power over the people, like FB/Messenger/Whatsapp/Instagram are the top apps everyone uses. I am glad Snapchat didn't sell out.
The phrase "network effect" exists for a reason. Where people don't think about keeping in touch with others in any terms other than Facebook, refusing to play along with Facebook comes with serious consequences.
The discussions have ballooned, but having read the other two in the morning, this one just feels like a rehash of the same privacy concerns folks have raised. And for anyone reading about possible solutions to their concerns, they'd have to jump between 2-3 different threads now.
I'm glad there's at least WhatsApp thread is on front page for everyone's sake, but personally I felt like the Looking ahead for WhatsApp discussion covered much of what's being said here. The difference is that poster didn't have as good of a title and submitted it when much of the West Coast was still asleep.
Also, while this site doesn't have the resources to comb and diff each new thread to make sure it's not a dupe, I wish more users would point this out when it does happen. At the very least, thanks for pointing out the two existing threads, but we shouldn't be afraid of merging threads to make it easier for future users to reference (if they do).
Since this is a bit meta I've detached the subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12361031 and marked it off-topic.
Especially since the bulk other thread was already talking about privacy concerns and most users would go down that route.
Also, you already do a great job moderating here, but this is just one of those few situations where I'm in disagreement with you on this particular instance.
Answer: Don't use Facebook.
"The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities."
Never does it say, you won't get ads. But if you share, you will get "improved ads".
Am I reading this right?
Uh, I mean, that's the whole point of facebook.
I don't want any of my info shared. Yet there is no way to opt out of it.
> The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.
So you can't not share.
Here's the link to delete your account. https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
- Your messages are yours, and we can’t read them. We’ve built privacy, end-to-end encryption, and other security features into WhatsApp. We don’t store your messages once they’ve been delivered. When they are end-to-end encrypted, we and third parties can’t read them.
So they can share location, phone number, contact book, maybe chat group names if they're not encrypted, and maybe the people participating in those groups, the online/offline status, who and when you call, what else am I missing?
"WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12358751
"Looking ahead for WhatsApp": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12358205
Normally we'd merge the threads, but the discussions are large and come from three different perspectives, so that might not be best. HN practice is to have one front-page thread at a time about a story, but if you're concerned about the topic you might want to check in on the other discussions.
This is one of the problems of digital identity--privacy has a latent value. The company you choose to share data with today, may choose choose to share with / merge with a third party in the future.
What a hassle.
The big news is that your eye-balls are officially for sale now. Marketing is specifically mentioned as a new form of communication towards the users. No banner ads (yet), but other formats.
It was good, while it lasted.
PS to WhatsApp: If you manage to launch a no-data-sale privacy option for x$/y, I signup in a heartbeat.
1) you did not have to scroll to opt out. 2) opting out brought up a toast saying "when you tap 'agree', your account info will be used to improve your Facebook ads and product experiences" 3) there was a " X not now" option in the top right corner.
I chose that.
Edit: no app update was required. I'm guessing in the future, the could push ads the same way
>The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.
>> After you agree to our updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, you will have an additional 30 days to make this choice by going to Settings > Account > Share my account info in the app. If you do not want your account information shared with Facebook to improve your Facebook ads and products experiences, you can uncheck the box or toggle the control.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12358205
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12358751
Duplicate threads like this just dilute the conversation especially when the comments made here are already opinions voiced elsewhere.
The Facebook family of companies
will still receive and use this
information for other purposes...
YOU DO NOT.
Translated literally it means "puppet-show"...