WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Ghostly found 40 trackers http://imgur.com/a/miilB, the ads are extremely obnoxious. There's literally ads on top of ads sliding down my screen, pushing the content around. https://gfycat.com/InsecureHealthyAurochs
Those in glass houses...
So nowadays I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, the "Tracking Protection" in Firefox enabled by default and I'm seriously considering NoScript, too bad it wasn't available for Firefox Android last time I checked.
The UI is cumbersome for this on Firefox Mobile, but it does work.
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/18037421/6...
All this for a 6-paragraph article.
Edit: I should mention that when blocking all 3rd-party scripts and frames for that page, the article could be read just fine, with only one connection to a 3rd-party server, standard.co.uk (probably related to independent.co.uk).
Turns off adblock and hits refresh
Jesus christ nope not again never again.
Turns adblock back on
It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share.
This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition and government needs to step in, like the US government did by splitting the telcos.
I can only guess (I am no expert) the challenge here is that government faces a legal void since these services are free as in no money was paid to use them. Owners of these services are on the ad business and there is plenty of competition there.
Government has no interest in protecting our privacy either, on the contrary, they want in!
We're left with two options: be a hermit and stop using FB and Whatsapp, or hack the system: install ad blockers + develop unofficial APIs to interact with these services on your own terms.
The main purpose of a business is to generate profit, not just revenue.
Apple is pretty clear evidence that you don't need a massive market share to be highly profitable.
> be a hermit and stop using FB and WhatsApp
Is that seriously how you see this? How exactly do you think people lived 10+ years ago, before either of those things existed?
I haven't had a Facebook account for many years and I've never had a WhatsApp account. Does that make me a hermit? Should I inform my wife and son? Will my friends already be aware of my hermit status, or will you inform them for me, because obviously without Facebook or WhatsApp I have no possible way to communicate with them.
Are you fucking kidding me?
A decade ago, international phone calls and SMS would have cost me an arm and a leg, and there's really no equivalent for Facebook which lets me keep in touch with the lives of people I care about on the other side of the world.
Yes, there was email but that doesn't really substitute for the short low-latency, ubiquitous worldwide communication of WhatsApp (and it certainly didn't 10 years ago when it was largely tethered to a desk) nor the ability to keep up with my friends unsolicited that is Facebook (what am I supposed to do, ask all of my friends to write me an email of what they're doing once a week?)
Are global migrant workers an edge case? perhaps. But while forfeiting FB and WhatsApp wouldn't make me a hermit, it would certainly make communications with my friends and family back home to be lesser in number and richness.
I didn't say you shouldn't or can't use Facebook. I said it's ridiculous to equate a lack of Facebook with a hermit lifestyle, even for geographically distant people.
There are literally dozens of ways to keep in contact using Internet based communication channels. If you choose to use those that are controlled by a privacy whoring twat of a company, that's your business.
Google has been doing a good job in maintaining the technical superiority of their search engine and haven't provided a serious incentive for people to switch, even though they came close with their whole Google+ clusterfuck.
That said, Bing and DuckDuckGo did make a dent in Google's market share, it's not much, but it's significant enough that they'll still exist for some time. The problem of Bing and DuckDuckGo is that they are optimized for the US market, not for the international one. As I kept telling people, the search results of Bing and DuckDuckGo in Europe are horrible.
But Google can lose against local search engines. Baidu is the primary search engine in China, not Google. Yandex is the primary search engine in Russia, not Google.
> How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC?
OS X hasn't won a majority, but it won the market that mattered - that of professionals and software developers. At this point, for most users, Windows is nothing more than a shell for your browser, or for games distributed by Steam or through PirateBay. If it weren't for Microsoft Office & Exchange keeping it alive in enterprises, it would have been long gone.
Even so, both OS X and Windows are going to be cannibalized by Android and iOS. It's going to be a sad day for those of us that were born in an era when computing wasn't locked down in walled gardens, but make no mistake as it happens. Chrome OS has been quite successful and Google is merging it with Android. Microsoft themselves have seen the writing on the wall, hence their desperate attempts to inflate the Windows 10 numbers and make it seem a success.
> This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition
You're wrong, free market competition works, but not in the way you think it does. You can't beat big companies at their own game, since they have huge resources that you don't, but you can invent technologies that make old monopolies irrelevant. Read the "Innovator's dilemma", it happens all the time.
DuckDuckGo still doesn't appear as more than a blip on most market share charts.
As for Bing, the only reason it made a dent on Google is because Microsoft leveraged its own monopoly position on Windows to default searches to Bing. After that, it just had to be "good enough", which it is.
A service like this doesn't need to be super popular. If it carves out an important niche, such as privacy aware users, then it can stay in the business and be a solid alternative for a long time. And they'll grow in market share too, they just need to stay afloat for long enough.
That might be true, but I'm just fine using ddg as my search engine and Linux as my OS. Social network is a bit more tricky: it's social and, well, a network. Even so, however it is only logical that something like this happens to WhatsApp, and I well understood this since the very beginning, I used WhatsApp only because it's painless, so why not? I don't really need it. So now I'm dropping out with a clear heart and if somebody will ask, why I'm not available anymore, I'll encourage them to install some other messenger. Telegram, perhaps. It won't be really bothersome, as most of us are using several messaging apps anyway. I believe somebody will do this as well.
So, even though WhatsApp was an undeniable success, I don't really see it as something stable. As a monopoly.
Actually, it can. Android and iOS are killing Windows as mobile is taking over the world and is now the #1 computer people use. Chrome dominates IE and MacOS is devs preferred OS when it used to be Windows. I think the free market is doing its job here. As for Google, they are still doing an amazing job with Search, if they start slacking and stop innovating, then this will create incentives for competition not to mention Apple who is trying to remove Google from the Search experience altogether. Same thing for Facebook.
The only real monopolies are the one maintained by the use of force by governments where competition can not flourish simply because the government makes it illegal to do so (taxi vs uber, hotels vs airbnb etc). Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook don't force you to use their services at gun point, which is why people are free to leave when better alternatives come, and they always do. Unless they make use of government force to prevent competitors from doing so (taxis vs uber etc).
Have to give to the government for doing an amazing job at making people believe they are defending you from monopolies when they are in reality monopolies biggest backers.
> This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market
You said:
>The only real monopolies are the one maintained by the use of force by governments where competition can not flourish simply because the government makes it illegal to do so
100% agree.
Ironic that the OP is saying that "this situation cannot be reversed by free market" when it seems that the most obvious business opportunity visible here is a privacy-conscious messaging service.
No one is making the parent use whatsapp/FB, and there are many competing services. Some free, some not. Sort of stunning lack of imagination.
I don't see what your point is with regards to search engines and operating systems. There are a ton of search engines (Bing, DDG, Gigablast, ...) and a ton of operating systems (Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, etc). You're complaining that Microsoft and Google are dominating their markets and being abusive, but also complaining the alternatives aren't dominating the market and being abusive?
And in the grand scheme of things, social networking sites are not very important. There's a million other ways to communicate with people that don't involve Facebook, so use one of them.
Of course, whoever comes next to dominate chat may or may not have more customer friendly privacy/data sharing than FB/WhatsApp.
Edit - Also a reminder to founders: If you want your vision for the company to survive, don't sell it!
I also think there's an inherent lesson for users here, more than it is for founders: don't trust startups, most of them won't survive and won't have the decency to die either, preferring instead to sell your account and data to the highest bidder.
Or just because the price is right. Some may believe that they can do something even greater with the money, and some simply realize that a lot of money is the more attractive option for them. The latter may even have faith that the purchaser will keep the vision alive (and most will be disappointed in that respect).
The following post has already been linked many times during the related comment threads, but I am posting it again because I bet most people never actually read the whole thing.
----------
Link: https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads
Text:
When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake... and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement.
Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered the alternative?"
-----------
Notice the last line. And ask yourself if you were one of those people who actually believed these words when the blog post was published.
This is why we really need to be outraged. It is surprisingly easy to say the kind of words that con people and then take advantage of them over the long run. And then we make it worse by acting like it is no big deal. Acting like it is no big deal actually emboldens such companies. Now clearly FB lacks this moral compass right at the top (and yes, all my comments make this pretty obvious), but I am starting to wonder if the companies are getting away because there are absolutely no negative sanctions. Soon, this will just become the norm and the accepted practice. If LittleStartupCo pulls a similar bait and switch tomorrow, they will say "Yeah, but WhatsApp did the same thing, and there was a small commotion and people just quickly moved on"
Don't move on. Actually create a ruckus and cause some backlash. If the only problem that the company faces is a few nerds making a small ruckus on a nerd forum, then they will keep doing these things.
Instead, next time you see your friend who works at Facebook/Google/Microsoft/... talk about ethics in any context, mock them for participating in the discussion when they clearly don't have the spine to display the same ethics in their professional work. Just automatically discount their views/doubt their motives in every context, and I bet you will see the message will slowly start moving up to the top of the org.
Even better, stop hiring alumni of these organizations unless they make an open statement that they were sorry for their involvement in organizations which had no regard for privacy. Does it sound drastic? Then how does it feel to have supported the rise of WhatsApp in their days when they badly needed the support, only to see the bait and switch and the oh so casual - "sorry, but we are not really sorry, just FO losers"?
As far as I can tell, WhatsApp never said they would show ads in their app, and they never said they would sell ads.
On the contrary, they said that they would make it even harder for them to have any data to work with, as messages will be end-to-end encrypted, and so, undecipherable for them.
What they said would happen was telephone and metadata (ie, telephone contacts) cross-references with Facebook's data to improve Facebook's suggestions, which is a roundabout but logical non-automatic contact synchronization scheme.
Reading between the lines, what their blog post was meant to prepare the public for was the arrival of a bot API (as yet secret, and a pure speculation on my part). They want businesses both global and local to communicate with you:
> we want to explore ways for you to communicate with businesses that matter to you too, while still giving you an experience without third-party banner ads and spam
WhatsApp's PR department did a poor job, in my opinion, by talking about Facebook being able to offer better ads, since naturally everyone assumes it means transmitting your telephone number to advertisers, which they awkwardly mention they would not do:
> We won’t post or share your WhatsApp number with others, including on Facebook, and we still won't sell, share, or give your phone number to advertisers.
From their update ( https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#key-updates )
"New ways to use WhatsApp. We will explore ways for you and businesses to communicate with each other using WhatsApp, such as through order, transaction, and appointment information, delivery and shipping notifications, product and service updates,
>>and marketing.<<
For example, you may receive flight status information for upcoming travel, a receipt for something you purchased, or a notification when a delivery will be made.
>>Messages you may receive containing marketing could include an offer for something that might interest you.<<
We do not want you to have a spammy experience; as with all of your messages, you can manage these communications, and we will honor the choices you make."
I interpret the highlighted parts to mean they intend to show ads in the application in some format. It could be ad overlays, it could be adbots sending messages and it could be ad notifications.
Edits: figuring out how to highlight text :X
That formulation is pretty damning. There's the chance that marketing material will only be delivered to users that used a commercial bot, but that would still be unsolicited in my opinion.
A business account for one-to-one communications with a business would be somewhat revolutionary. It's more private (and conversational) than Twitter, less bulky and in-the-way than email, etc.
Or was that just lip service to appease the public that Facebook is doing nothing wrong, because after all, it's being watched by the FCC?
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...
By the way, even if what Facebook is doing now doesn't violate that settlement with the FCC, I'm 100% certain Whatsapp was already sharing phone contacts with Facebook many months before this policy change. So at least that should've violated the settlement. It's just that they didn't get caught doing it before any official noticed.
The reason I say I'm confident they were doing that is because I barely use Facebook at all on the PC, I never installed Facebook's app on my phone, and yet Facebook started suggesting me people I was talking to on Whatsapp to add as friends. And I've seen quite a few other people mention similar situations on the web as well.
Why is the FCC sleeping on the job?
There's also the newly open-sourced Wire - it has the same dependence on Google, but it supports video calling and some might prefer their UI.
Last I looked it couldn't be used with third party clients either, and any desktop client requires tethering to an Android or IOS smartphone.
Wire looks a bit more sensible, but still works exclusively on their servers.
Oh well.
Edit: we started using WhatsApp many years ago before the FB purchase, when not only did iMessage suck for groups - oh wait, it still does - and text messaging was expensive, but we needed something stable and cross-platform. WhatsApp delivered on all of that, where iMessage was decidedly iOS only, BBM kept reaching its hand out of the grave but not for long, and Google offerings were impossible for 75 year old relatives to understand. I still like WhatsApp, and the server tech is tops. Too bad it's going this way.
After the activation he couldn't log in using the browser. It said "no connection" even though that wasn't true. He then installed the Windows desktop app which forced him to upload a photo, which he actually didn't wanted to. Apparently there was a button to skip this step but it didn't work.
After some time we were finally chatting for a while. While we both enjoyed the fact that it is secure, open-source and has some great features (like the yt video integration) he found the desktop client "confusing" (don't really know what exactly he meant by that tbh).
At this point we were unsure whether or not we wanted to continue using wire in the future. But then his desktop application crashed and he couldn't start it anymore. He tried the web app again but it still wouldn't work.
Long story short: Chances are we are not going to use wire again in the future. And this is really unfortunate as I'd prefer to use it! The problem is: convincing people to try it is hard enough. If then their first experience isn't super smooth they a.) won't use it and b.) are probably less open to try a different messenger in the future.
And now what? We can't resort to Signal as I still prefer using a dumb phone. And then there is Telegram but I don't trust their security measures. What's more, I really don't see the necessity to tell a messenger my phone number.
There are workarounds but they're not as painless as simply deciding to 'use an alternative chat alternative'. It's like saying you don't like English? Well try esperanto and good luck functioning in the US. I've given some extremely exaggerated examples, particularly this last one haha, but I've found reliance on Whatsapp to be substantial and on the rise.
I do agree by the way that this isn't that big a deal. I'm completely fine to continue using them, but if I wasn't the proposed 'just stop using them, there's chat alternatives' really doesn't fly. It'd be really shitty.
In my experience telling people that you prefer a different medium from whatsapp is not a big deal.
edit: to clarify I mean I should join the opt-out side to help stop it from becoming socially unacceptable
It is perfectly possible not to use them (I don't), but it is not without downsides.
Either way, it's time to switch banks. And it's a good thing that you told me about it, as in Romania we also have ING and was considering then for my business account.
I will double check, but I think the setup and configuration is already complete for most people's phones, so no additional install needed.
Some people will understand why you don't have Facebook, but not having WhatsApp is downright mad. Specially if you work with technology.
The only people I know that don't have it are luddites or very old people, and even they are far and few between.
I don't have it and no one I interact with at work had asked for my WhatsApp. I work in tech but NOT in the SV bubble. Everyone I know uses Google Hangouts.
Messenger apps have always been regional, back in high school everyone I knew used MSN Messenger while people I knew from my old hometown were all on AIM.
tl;dr: there are a lot of countries/language regions where Whatsapp is the absolutely dominant messenger.
I think you mean especially. And no its not uncommon to not have or use Whatsapp. Nobody on my current team uses it and nobody on my last one did either. We use IRC and Slack and that is enough. And none of us are Luddites or old people.
As it's been said before, it's very geographically dependent. In here, there isn't a local shop or service that doesn't advertise its WhatsApp number. Even the city hall's ombudsman answers via WhatsApp. Not email, not phone.
I'd love to be able to communicate through open protocols such as IRC and email alone. But that's not the world I, and I would wager, most, live in.
Not even remotely. I realize that WhatsApp is a big thing, but I've never even used it or have anyone in my circle who uses it. And I work in the tech industry.
Do people really feel social pressure to use a specific app?
I can't deduce from your profile where you are from, but can people stop extrapolating the situation in the US to the rest of the world? There are many countries where is Whatsapp is far more popular than SMS or any other messenger, country-wide.
The relevant part:
"I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.
However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.
So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all."
END QUOTE
There's some irony here now that Moxie has teamed up with Facebook to work on WhatsApp.
And Google with their Allo : https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/
OK, so then your phone number is still being shared with Facebook through people who use WhatsApp and have you in their contact list. How do you opt out of that?
There are some Internet 'outrages' that are just sound and fury, but this one has merit. A company that gained access to one of people's most private networks, their contact list, on a guarantee of privacy that has been unilaterally revoked. People were gladly paying to maintain the service and the associated level of privacy.
Thankfully the ICO in the UK is 'outraged' enough to formally investigate:
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...
The Whatsapp ToS also says that they can change the ToS anytime they want and however they want and people using their software knew this. This is the risk that exists with every single proprietary platform. If you don't own the code, eventually it is going to screw you, Stallman has been saying so for 40 years now and people still get surprised when it happens even though it eventually happens to every single proprietary platform. Don't want to get screwed over? Use open source platform where you control your data.
As for the ICO, they are the incompetents responsable for the cookie alert on every page simply because they don't understand how stateless network protocol work, no doubt they will do a great job "investigating" this case /s
This isn't just about WhatsApp. Just about every Cloud service ToS ever written contains the provision to "change the ToS anytime they want and however they want ". People have a (probably ill-founded) expectation that those changes will be fairly reasonable. By pushing things to the legal limit (and beyond) WhatsApp is poisoning the well for everybody else.
You have to appreciate that if users no longer have any trust in the cloud then half the readers of this site are going to be out of a job. You think all the people who attend your React.js conferences are working on open source projects that the users install on hardware that they control? I very much doubt it.
If you think Stallman is right then surely you should be spreading this example of his correctness to as many people as possible so that they find out about it. But the impression I get from your posts is that you'd rather people weren't talking about it at all.
Personally I hope that more Cloud services blatantly piss off their users in this way, because I want the entire idea of cloud services to be discredited. And yes that means that I'm hoping Patrick Aljord doesn't have cloud startup devs paying to attend his javascript conferences anymore.
I agree, but the problem here is ignorance. Ignorant people are always going to get screwed, that's why we should fight ignorance and educate users. Fighting people taking advantage of this ignorance is just fighting the symptoms of the real problem that is ignorance, it is also a losing battle. So, I prefer spending time educating people about these issues rather than attacking whatsapp, facebook and other apps they love as this just makes us look grumpy. I think it's ok to use the cloud as long as you're aware nothing you put in there won't be spied on unless you encrypt _before_ uploading it to the cloud (end to end), then you should be ok. So either don't put anything too personal on the cloud or encrypt it before hand is the advice I give.
If it turns out that they're still using our data for advertisement purposes between the two platforms after opting out, then we can be outraged.
The problem is that when Whatsapp gained traction, they were a company that built much of their reputation on charging a small yearly fee rather than selling your data or putting up advertisements. Or to quote 2012's Whatsapp once more:
Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.
Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads?
It's clear why people are upset.
The topic at hand is that the opt out doesn't stop Facebook accessing the whatsapp data, only prevents them from using it for advertising purposes.
In the UK, where I have to pay money for media messaging and international SMS, WhatsApp is great. It's ad policy was something of its appeal that allowed me to see past the lock-in to one vendor.
If you don't like it, use _anything_ else. You can even use damn SMS, I guess in 2016 they are unlimited everywhere in the world.
The data WhatsApp will still share with Facebook is the type of data that can be anonymized and while I'm not saying it will (I mean why would they bother? Probably more valuable to NOT anonymize) it's the typical data most apps are collecting.