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Comment by toprea | Hacker News Reader

Just thinking out loud here, as I was considering something like this.

I can also not give up the WhatsApp account due to the social pressure. What if I would use a second phone, a cheap one, used only for the whatsapp (and some other essential but privacy invasive apps). I would not have that second phone always with me, but it would provide me access to the social network I need without feeling tracked or providing more data than needed.

I do understand that this doesn't fix exactly the issue presented here, but I already assumed that whatsapp data was already in Facebook's hands one way or another. But I would limit the amount of information that WhatsApp can track about me by having this application on a phone which does not really represent my full actions as i don't have it with me.

Edit: Corrected some typos.

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Trouble is you are privileged enough to be able to afford two phones. For many families, even a $300 device is a significant expense. So if your approach was the only approach, only the rich would have privacy.

Why the use of the word “privilege”? We don’t know what balance of OP’s wealth is earned vs unearned (privilege).

It could also be that he had the "privilege" to earn it (as not everyone has that privilege).

Or it could be they just worked really hard or prioritised or what do I know.

But I agree privilege is vastly overused.

Seems a bit reductionist of the concept of privilege because everything becomes privilege as there is someone who has experienced worse with few options. For an extreme example, dying with cancer becomes a privilege compared to someone who loses their life immediately in an accident. Only one of those two has a chance to say goodbye as well as prepare their friends and family.

It’s not just reductionist, it’s a misuse of the word in a way that is becoming more fashionable. Buying phones does not come under the meaning of privilege, unless perhaps you’re in prison (I struggle to think of an example that might occur and isn’t patently absurd). The rest of us can walk into a shop, those things that are open to the public.

Hopefully this misuse is just a fad and we can go back to a more sensible use.

Exactly. Privilege can indeed be earned through hard work (without implying that's the only way to gain/earn it), and one is free to use privilege in life. It's still privilege, and the troublesome part is when that goes unacknowledged.

Who does not have the privilege to earn money for a second phone and what would that privilege be?

We also don't know how much the phone was. It could have been a very cheap device. My main phone was £200 and the previous one was £120.

Looking on Amazon.com, a Huawei P Smart 2019 (32GB, 3GB) 6.21" FHD+ Display, Dual Camera, 3400 mAh Battery, 4G LTE GSM Dual SIM is $209.99.

I think some have assumed that he went out and bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max as a second phone, and we don't know that.

Thankfully his approach is not the only approach - just don't use WhatsApp! I never have despite the pleadings of my friends to use it.

If they can't be bothered to email or send an SMS to me or use Signal or video call via the multitude of alternative messaging services (Duo, FaceTime, Skype, Signal etc. etc.) I don't think they're that bothered about being my friend are they?

If their friendship hinges on me using a specific mobile app, that's a shallow friendship.

There's a "social capital" thing going on here. Your friends are usually willing to make some amount of effort to talk and hang out with you, depending on how close friends you are, but there are limits to that. Nobody wants to get together with someone who insists on doing everything their way every time. Most people don't care to spend what social capital they have getting their friends to use a different messaging app. You're only burning even more social capital if you try to lecture them about things they don't care about, such as Facebook having their personal information.

Particularly, this social capital is at its minimum when you're trying to develop new friendships. Good luck starting any when you refuse to use the app that everyone else in the area uses to communicate.

That just sounds like "everyone else is smoking, so I should start smoking too". Just because everyone else is doing it does not mean it is the right thing for you to do.

In this instance, if developing friendships relies on me sending my data to some unknown person the other side of the world so that they can build graphs on my activity and follow me around just because everyone else has decided that's what they want to do, then I would choose another path.

Wouldn't you? If not, please send me all your data and details of your activities, all the time. If you can trust that data to some guy you've never met in a datacenter, then why not send it to me. You've got my username - that's more than you'll ever know about the people looking at your data at Facebook.

> "everyone else is smoking, so I should start smoking too"

No, what they said is equivalent to "everybody is smoking but I'll annoy the hell out of them so they stop, and I'll refuse to meet them in person before they quit"

It's an individual-level realpolitik. You (the general you) are welcome to take such a stand if you care to, but the price is that your social opportunities may be severely constrained. There might be other things about you or your life that also constrain your social opportunities, things more important than who has your data, and if that's the case, then taking such a stand may leave you rather seriously isolated.

I would not "choose another path" because those things are more important to me. To be blunt, I'm not sending such data to any individual HN reader because that would have no relation at all to my practical ability to maintain friendships with people in real life.

You may have missed the point that in Europe, many many things are organised via WhatsApp. Kids football clubs, dance clubs, parents' evenings, school closures, social club outings, ...lots of things.

Other people are saying that in their countries, Health Services and bank transactions are coordinated via WhatsApp.

It's not just about messaging your friends, and for many people, "opting out" of WhatsApp is not a viable path.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669702

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669600

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671117

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25671855

I live in the UK. I understand that people arrange items via WhatsApp but it seems baffling to me. Why not just use email to notify people??

When you sign up to any service, they ask for an email address. They don't ask for a mobile number necessarily, and there is never a "my mobile number is on WhatsApp" checkbox. Why is the assumption of the organiser that you're on WhatsApp your concern? They have assumed you're on a certain platform, and it's their mistake.

It reminds me of the tidal wave of people suddenly abandoning their own websites and instead using "Find Us On Facebook". They might as well put "Use this keyword on AOL".

Facebook is not the internet, and WhatsApp is not the only communication method.

Perhaps it's baffling, and perhaps I agree, but one cannot deny the reality. They don't use email, they do use WhatsApp, and not using WhatsApp is effectively impossible for people in that situation.

Then the reality is insanity!

My mind is blown.

You can be as upset about the state of things as you want to be -- yes, it's wrong and broken and unfair -- but you can't change the state of things by just wishing hard enough. The GP's point stands, things are organized via WA, even though they shouldn't be, so your choices are exactly these:

  - Use WA and participate
  - Don't use WA, don't participate
  - Go stand in front of the home of whoever organizes the activity and have a little one-person picket parade with angrily-worded signs -- this is the same as #2 but might make you feel better

I am not upset about it at all - I think you are projecting that. I don't use it and it doesn't affect me. I was just presenting the alternative mechanism of using the established communication method of email for notification of events since an email account is requested for most things (tax returns, bank account, most accounts).

Please describe what you mean by “privilege”. Privileged enough to have a second phone? What does that even mean? Am I also privileged to have a second laptop and a PS4? Should I feel ashamed because of this and why, exactly?

If you can afford to have a throwaway phone with a second phone line of service -- remember, WA must be tied to a phone number, and you don't want to give FB your real phone number, right? -- then you are probably doing better than the average person. Remember all those articles about how the average US resident can't afford a single $400 surprise bill? That's called privilege. Nobody is saying to "feel ashamed" about it, just remember that if you're suggesting a second phone as an acceptable solution to this problem.

That wasn’t me, I did not suggest that. Though your choice of wording is horrendous and your understanding of the term “privilege” is ridiculously wrong and borderline humiliating. It is not a privilege if you earned it by hard work. I spent years, decades of my life learning languages, educating myself in tech, and now you are saying that I am more privileged than an average person because I am earning more? I don’t think so.

On Android you could use Shelter [1]. Might no be as good as as second phone but it heavily limits the data you expose. You can also freeze the app if you don't use it actively.

The biggest annoyance is that Android only allows having exactly one of those "Work Profiles".

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

>What if I would use a second phone, a cheap one, used only for the whatsapp (and some other essential but privacy invasive apps). I would not have that second phone always with me, but it would provide me access to the social network I need without feeling tracked or providing more data than needed.

This is what I'm doing currently: an old phone used exclusively for whatsapp (with an empty contact list); it always stays at home. I only use it to coordinate kid's stuff (school, social activities, etc), so there is no problem with me not having it with me the whole time.

You can limit what an app can gather anyway, if you wish. If you would go to such extremes to have a second device just for WhatsApp, there are ways to hide things from it on your one main device, too. I go for microg in order to cut Google's surveillance, and usually allow no permissions on untrusted apps, so all they can get is the IP. You can mitigate that too when needed, though probably with more effort than is practical (accessing the internet is something that can also be restricted from default Android permissions).

When this article went up, I realized that I'd allowed WA to access my Contacts, so I went in and revoked that permission. It immediately reformatted my whole conversation list as phone numbers instead of names. I can't rename the conversation, but I can "add to contacts"... which inexplicably shows me my OS contact editor, which they're not allowed to read. So I guess that as punishment for not letting them constantly vacuum up my contact list and send it all to FB, they make it harder to figure out who I'm talking to. Classic FB.

I have a second dirt-cheap used phone with a disposable SIM card just for WA. But you could make a WA<->Matrix<->Signal bridge (https://matrix.org/bridges/) using a temporary phone no.

Or even a VM if you don't want to have a physical phone.

I've recently switched to using Whatsapp in an emulator, which is kinda similar. I even almost got a virtual camera working so I can share my desktop screen via whatsapp call (would be super useful for parent tech support). Laptop cameras should work fine though.

I'd be very interested if you could add some info regarding what software you used to do this.

I used Bluestacks emulator (and Nox too, one has to be a clone of the other I guess) to run the app. For the virtual camera I used OBS with a plugin to emulate a webcam. This worked for the webcam feed in the browser, but in Windows > Camera it wasn't detecting anything. I got the same results when trying to use an old smartphone as a camera via DroidCam before I gave up.

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