Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

Well it's not entirely a fair comparison since iMessage doesn't support in-app services and purchasing like Facebook Marketplace, as WhatsApp does. For which naturally it has to gather additonal data.

Also until iMessage is available on other platforms, what it slurps or doesn't slurp is academic for most users of WhatsApp.

View on HN

That doesn't follow, Apple provides 6 different purposes for collecting data linked to the user:

* Third-Party Advertising

* Developer’s Advertising or Marketing

* Analytics

* Product Personalization

* App Functionality

* Other Purposes

The features you mentioned would fall under "App Functionality" and as you imply it would be legitimate. The reservation with Facebook is all the data they collect for the five other purposes. In my own analysis of thousands apps[0] I explicitly excluded data collected for app functionality purposes because of this. FWIW most of Facebook's app collect 128 data types(by far the most of the ~5000 apps I've analysed) across those five purposes, WhatsApp collects only 18.

0: https://hugotunius.se/2021/01/03/an-analysis-of-privacy-on-t...

Why would I want in-app services and purchasing like Facebook Marketlplace in my chat messaging app? It should facilitate chat and messaging, and no more. This is how it used to be, until Facebook acquired and ruined WhatsApp.

Because other chat systems in other countries (like WeChat) did, it was a great success and FB copied it.

I don't know about that, I have literally never used it or heard of it. It was today I learned that WhatsApp has a bunch of these useless features.

Besides, China should not be your model if you care about privacy.

Do one thing well is not the only valid model. For instance why would you want apps on your phone? It should facilitate phone calls and messaging.

I don’t think more features is the issue. It’s adding them at the cost of your personal data, especially when you need to pay the cost even when you don’t use those features.

It’s unclear that these data is collected if you don’t use these features.

Same as an app may need disclose it can use you mic, but it only does it if you use specific features. (The model for such permissions used to be before installation on Android and improved over time, and perhaps something similar can be done for data collection permissions as well)

Right now, more features, whether you use them or not, will have their data collection appear on this screen, without context. So while these labels are a welcome addition, they can also be scarier than reality.

You're saying that WhatsApp needs more data for additional features. But I don't use Facebook Marketplace, I just use messaging; it makes sense for me to compare WhatsApp with apps that act as communication tools only.

I think most WhatsApp users see WhatsApp like this and I'd guess article's authors assumed the same.

Maybe FB should have let WhatsApp be a messenger then and made the Marketplace its own app. But this way, the tracking functions can be pushed to everyone under the guise of the Marketplace functions, even if they only use the Messenger.

Facebook is persona non grata when it comes to trusting them to use information that they’d obviously need for a service only in the way they’d obviously need to use it while not adding it their advertising database.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com