Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.
I understand why you hold this view but woe I wish it to be that more people agreed with me and held the opposite. I wish we were fine with paying money instead of "being monetized" and having ads shoved in front of us.
I don't want to see how they deploy the ads; I don't want ads, period. By their very nature, ads are a guarantee that I'm going to be tracked, sliced, analyzed, deanonymized, and attention-grabbed any time I crack open that app. I guess I'm turning more and more into the Luddite but I am tired of the ads, tired of the continual chase for my ever-decreasing number of seconds on this planet.
I don't even know that letting me pay to not have ads is a) practical (because what's to say the ads aren't being shown in a "hidden" way such that I am still tracked and followed) or b) fair (because what about the other billions of people on the planet for whom money can't be traded for time as they have more of the latter than the former yet still don't deserve to be tracked). But I still don't like ads.
And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space.
End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...
Well, they do collect and use metadata, e.g. chat history: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats...
There's better options regarding privacy, e.g. Signal, which does not collect metadata.
Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/new-docu...
In WhatsApp, the server delivers your encrypted message to each member of the group. It's an optimization called "server-side fan-out". Check the whitepaper for more deatils: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...
Interestingly this is also what the Signal libraries implement. So applications making use of them will generally make use of this optimization.
For some reason, the Signal application itself was not making use of this optimization. My guess is that it had not updated its code yet when I looked. This might have changed since then.
BUT, and that's a big but, as a passive observer (and if Signal kept logs of things) you can still figure out group chat membership by looking at who sent the same kind of message (same length) to who, and at what time. Basic relationship graph stuff.
Didn't you see recently on HN they announced they now have a mechanism so that their servers aren't even aware of who sent a message? The recipient can tell who it's from but the server just sees like a stamp on the outside "This is one of the messages Bob agreed to receive from people" and it says to itself "OK, Bob said he wants these, don't care who it's from".
AIUI The system can count usages of Bob's tokens and rate-limit those. If Bob's Ex Gina is sending him fifty "Fuck you, Bob" messages per day, that might mean Bob's friend Harry has to admit his identity to the server to cut through the noise. Eventually Bob blocks Gina and she's no longer able to use his token and annoy his friends. Blocking someone invalidates your old tokens.
I think WA is the most widespread but I wouldn't call it the simplest or most reliable. They are all pretty similar imo
The regular "Telegram" has secret chat. It is tied to device, but you can do desktop -> phone or desktop -> desktop or phone -> desktop specifically, but that depends on a bit of coordination.. but yeah definitely not synced between each combination
Why is this an either/or situation? Why not give users the option to pay if they so choose?
And the flipside is that people will look at your app and say "what have you done for me lately? What features have you added?"
Which was the reason they could scale to their current userbase with some 50 people.
Consider that large portions of the world (among them Germany with its extremely old population) use WhatsApp pretty much exclusively; they don't seem to have a problem using it.
Whereas something like iMessage would be a complete nonstarter with its semi-iOS exclusivity.