Brazilian doctors use WhatsApp to talk to patients
cityam.com
cityam.com
The Brazilian Conselho Federal de Medicina (main medical association) published a memo telling doctors not to use it, but very few will pay attention.
As always happens in Brazil only a tragedy can make people notice a problem. A couple lawsuits, some national scandal and people will learn.
Besides, there is also a cultural element here: privacy is a lot more valued in anglo-saxon cultures than in Latino cultures. Brazilians, Italians and others are a lot less concerned about things such as personal space, body contact, exhibiting in a small bikini, going almost naked in a Carnaval parade, etc.
Edit: Just for HN to have an idea of how big WhatsApp is: since May, the number of cell phone lines in Brazil is falling. More than 10 million lines are canceled. Young people are giving up on voice services and using exclusively WhatsApp for communications.
Source: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
No one would send personal information through Facebook public posts, but if Facebook has a "private" or "group" setting then people will trust that thing is really not being seen by anybody.
I don't use Facebook or WhatsApp to not encourage these stupidities, but some other day a friend told me she was very annoyed by the fact that advertisign suddenly began to appear on Facebook about a topic she had just mentioned in a "private" chat conversation.
Speaking specifically about Brazilians, privacy works differently but so does "trust". Brazilians prefer to use intermediaries to establish trust much more so than North Americans:
- You cannot rent an apartment in Brazil without going through a broker (unless you know the owner personally). Brazilians will pay a middleman for some reason. In Canada and the USA, it's the opposite -- almost nobody uses a broker; the renter and the owner deal with each other.
- Professional jobs like software development go through recruitment firms almost exclusively. Whereas a big company would hire directly in the USA, in Brazil they'll use one of the Brazilian recruiting firms and pay a large fee. And professionals (such as programmers) will browse the recruiting firm's site and won't think to apply directly to the company.
- Brazilians are unlikely to invite a stranger they met (over the Internet, by phone, or even in person) into their home. Even if the person is a professional business contact. In Canada/USA, people are much more open to inviting a business contact into their home. But if the Brazilian has an introduction to the person by a mutual friend, then the person is no longer a stranger; he is immediately welcome.
Both privacy and trust work differently in Brazil.
In the absence of some kind of really amazing and free dedicated app, it actually seems very efficient! I have zero faith in any of those mandated health information privacy schemes anyway.
It's a regulatory and educational problem, not a technical one. While it could be improved, and it's far from perfect, there's no reason what so ever to believe it's un-fixable.
But I suppose if other parents don't join in (shit most of them use WhatsApp themselves), what hope do their kids have? And I don't want to get my daughter ostracized so being heavy handed seems like a long-term losing strategy.
Doesn't help that this is in a 3rd world Central American country and that vile, anti-net-neutrality zero-rating is in effect for FB stuff. You can basically pick up any phone, and WhatsApp will work, even if nothing else[1] does. Apart from the cost of the phone, there's no cost, at all, as far as I can see.
1: Including emergency, as this country hasn't really gotten to that point yet.
I travel, from time to time, to countries such as the UAE, Singapore and France. I once attempted to get people to use Signal. No luck. HN seemed to have arrived at a consensus that Telegram is a crock of shit. So I shifted - in part due to local adoption - to WhatsApp. When their in-app calling was blocked in each of the above countries, I gained a little faith in their security model.
When texting on WhatsApp gets blocked in the above mentioned countries then you'll know it's secure.
http://www.blog.twosense-labs.com/whatsapp-renegs-on-their-p...
Wow.
Signal, or even Telegram (despite it's stupid crypto, the E2E stuff _should_ work if verified right, and it's a marginally better client at the moment) should suffice without sacrificing privacy.
brazil has a huge mentality of "belonging". Supermaket chains that market to upper-middle class (think whole foods) charge 4-10x more for the same product (R$20 instead of R$2.50 for bottled water, same brand). and they are usually just a block from a regular market. yet, you see lines just because people want to belong by purchasing there.
WhatsApp was huge for people that needed to talk to folks overseas in brazil, and close to half the upper class and a large portion of the middle class in brazil sends their kids to study abroad. So flaunting WhatsApp instead of SMS is also a way to show off.
People use Whatsapp instead of SMS because it simply is a better user experience, specially for sending media and group chat, not for showing off, or keeping in touch with relatives abroad. Phone companies began offering "free whatsapp" even in pre-paid plans because it because it became very popular, as a way to attract costumers, not the other way around.
Then, after it was bought by facebook, they started to PAY telcos around the world to increase penetration and block any competitor.
...telcos offering something for free when they have a closed monopoly :) that was funny.
For example a married woman that wanted to cheat on her husband that is not having relations with her, sent me a message with her phone number asking me to talk to her on WhatsApp (but at least remembered to ask me to not call her...).
I am not into that stuff, still, that was only ONE example, in that day, I joined a evangelical christian chat when I was bored, and there was there lots of old guys clearly looking for sex (they had nicknames like "big cock 57" while moderators were out), and I saw a girls younger than 16 posting in the open chat their "watsapp" numbers wanting to chat, probably without realizing this were their personal phone numbers.
Also I've seen people going to great lenghs to stay anonymous online and then exchanging whatsapp number without realizing you can use this to track their real name down (unless the person was conscious enough to create a fake ID when buying the phone number, something I doubt that most people do).
On the other hand, in the US, many physicians are afraid to push the limit from the norm because they are afraid of being sued. That's not an unwarranted fear.
Some links on medical malpractice in Brazil:
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/11/05/359830235/b...
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/07/tech/why-texting-dilem...
where's the global study?
Show HN: we are aiming to make SMS texting more prevalent in business with Textline.com.
As City A.M. relies on advertising to fund its journalism, please disable any ad blockers from running on cityam.com, then reload the page to see the rest of this content. More info here."
kthxbye
Thanks!