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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

The whole world has already moved beyond texting. It's called WhatsApp.

I'm from the US but I've lived abroad the last four years. I'm still surprised so many people "back home" continue to use SMS texting. Everyone I know around the world uses WhatsApp. Literally, in every single continent I know and chat with people on WhatsApp.

Only Americans still use SMS from what I've seen. I just don't get it.

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Why would we want to move from SMS to a situation where Facebook ALSO has a copy of every message we send? Not an improvement.

facebook doesn't store your (sent) whatsapp messages, and in contrast to sms they're by default encrypted.

"Your Messages. We do not retain your messages in the ordinary course of providing our Services to you. Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files, and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device. If a message cannot be delivered immediately (for example, if you are offline), we may keep it on our servers for up to 30 days as we try to deliver it."

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/?eea=1#privacy-policy-informa...

Except it's a matter of record that Zuckerberg is intent on undoing e2ee in whatsapp, and increasing ads[1]. you can't inject ads unless you're scanning the texts.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-fou...

You can provide ads based on metadata alone, no need for message contents.

Ads based on metadata reveal message contents (people, location, time, and potentially message summarization).

Just like they weren't using your 2FA data to sell ads. At this point, it's best to assume that Facebook is watching at all times, even if they say they aren't. Does anyone propose anything really 'crazy out there' that Facebook does that actually doesn't eventually come true?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...

I really don't think the average person cares if their texts are end-to-end encrypted, though. I'm not sure most people even know what that would mean.

I didn't assert tha the average person cares, just that the original claim about whatsapp is false.

And also: it doesn't matter whether end users care about encryption or not, it still benefits them, this is exactly why end-to-end encryption is a very good default.

I agree the average person doesn’t know what it is, but I bet they would care if they did.

But Facebook doesn't have a copy of any message you send.

Uh huh. If they didn’t keep having to ‘correct’ their ‘mistatements’ about how many people were effected by their privacy screwups I might actually trust them on that.

They do, it's just encrypted. But they still know when you sent it, to whom, how large it was, and the cadence of typing notifications, among other things.

iOS holds something like 50% of US marketshare and iMessage takes a lot of the wind out of third-party messaging apps.

According to StatCounter, the iOS market share in the US is 57% [0]. But worldwide it is only 22% with Android at 75% [1].

[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-stat...

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Yes, hence the lower penetration of third party messaging apps in the US. In the US iMessage does much of what you'd want a third party app for and it's transparently integrated with SMS for approximately half the population.

Only in the US, I hear.

WhatsApp has made significant inroads in the US but it isn't universal. If you have a phone, you can almost 100% get texts.

I'm guessing the only thing that comes close to texting in terms of marketshare is iMessage. And that's simply because it is on every iOS device AND enabled by default.

That's really stupid. Whatsapp is proprietary and controlled by a single giant corporation. I refuse to use it even though everyone I know has it.

I'm not in the US, and I stopped using WhatsApp for several reasons. It doesn't provide me any benefits over SMS (people still need to know your phone number, for example, and if they change phone numbers, there's the whole game of figuring out who is messaging you). Not that many people I communicate with regularly really cared if we used it or another communications method either. It is one more app draining my phone's battery. And I want to limit the apps that Facebook can use to gain information about me.

But then you're a mainstream consumer. Most people use WhatsApp because they want to send pictures/videos/voice memo's which isn't possible over SMS. So it does provide benefits for most users.

WhatsApp tells you when someone changes it’s phone number.

Not in China. Its WeChat all the way, even when they live and work abroad.

Yep. It's quite clever, actually: chinese people come to other countries, they use wechat, they make friends, their friends want to communicate with them so they start using wechat. It's penetrating other markets that way, slowly but surely.

Don’t forget China can also see what you’re typing in wechat, really boggles my mind people continue to use that. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/07/wechat-chinese...

Very slowly, in that case. If you're the only 1 using a messaging service, you're super likely to switch to another one, or just use several.

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