Not surprised, but there's no way to spin this in a way that doesn't make Facebook look shady and bad. So much for "working with regulators".
"We are currently working to restore these features and will continue to update this document and the changelog section with the details as they are available."
Doesn't this suggest that they aren't being shut-down?
Interesting that Facebook and everyone else has been knowing that these rules have been coming for years, they still haven't been ready. Certainly reads like they haven't been working with anyone, and their last resort is now to temporary shut down the features they were unable to fix, during these years.
There's being ready, but I think there's also some wariness that the penalties for non-compliance are so severe that it's not worth taking the risk.
When GDPR was first being proposed, I was at a startup in the messaging space, and we were in the midst of expanding into European markets. The level of effort to ensure compliance wasn't that high, but without established case law and a history of enforcement actions, it was deemed too much of a risk so we pulled back.
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market.
and have done so for years.
Facebook's "currently" may be worth as much as the "engaged" and "committed" of those sites.
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."
Ok, I'm sure it'll be any day now…
A similar example is sending garbage to China. At a certain point China stopped accepting it. Hopefully soon others will do the same and recycling will be tackled correctly.
By popular I mean "small businesses start advertising contacting them through WhatsApp"-popular.
It would be nice to have a breakdown of these numbers but we'll probably never get them from FB.
Here in Mexico, any mobile data package comes with free data for blessed services like Whatsapp and FB Messenger. Obviously trying to compete with each other on these perks.
Using a competitor like Telegram is a complete nonstarter when trading memes or video chat eats into your data. The cheapest plan from Telcel (pay-as-you-go + holding 20 pesos in your balance) lets you use Whatsapp infinitely.
GG to competition.
But if the EU decides to legislate against FB, for example, I doubt they'll be that silly, they'll probably shoot these clauses down.
It is probably illegal (on the paper we have net neutrality, the telcos just blatantly break the law) to do so in Sweden which why some telcos are in a legal battle with our regulatory authority.
While useful to people, most of whom want to just go to Netflix, that level of integration doesn't feel right.
I feel like all of these apps (with special emphasis on Telegram and Signal) have almost the exact same UX and features of WhatsApp... beyond adoption numbers.
Surely one of these can take its place?
[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
Therefore, so far FB only collects contacts and improves its social network (in the technical sense) with WhatsApp.
Nothing that can replace WhatsApp? A simple messaging app like hundreds of others out there? If they shut down tomorrow I don't think anyone would be impacted. People would just switch to one of those. Nobody in 5-10 years would be like "I miss WhatsApp".