WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
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I feel like I will just give up and use WhatsApp and assume that I only had privacy pre-internet.
Yup, this is it. The point they've been waiting for us to cross. It was inevitable imo to not give up and surrender to it. It feels like we as a society are slowing transcending from the 4th to the 5th stage of grief.
I wonder how quickly they would switch if WhatsApp started requiring a monthly fee to use it. I get the feeling that big sense of helplessness would suddenly vanish.
If they claim to care so much about online data privacy, let them prove it. They've already proven they care a lot about price.
Everyone has time and ability to make their own choices with like-minded friends. They do it for everything else, that's how they started using WhatsApp and co in the first place. Their claims to caring about privacy are as convincing as a friend who keeps telling you "sorry, I'm too busy", "another time then?", "maybe", repeated ad nauseam. Then you see them at another party with someone else confusingly named "WhatsApp" and you realize they just couldn't make time for you, who is named "Signal".
Again, look at how quickly users switch when a service requires payment (IIRC WhatsApp did try to do this once and a lot of users chose to leave instead of paying). They're just too busy & helpless, right? How much proselytization did that take?
This was a process, not a 1-day switch from skype to whatsapp. The network effects are real, and if you don't understand how difficult it is to get people to join a chat app, you won't win.
Of course it's difficult to get people to join a chat app, and it should be. At a minimum you should need to provide something that users want and didn't have before. WhatsApp offered something new, it was an effective price tag of zero with phone number contacts. Skype offered something new and desirable (until it didn't). Snapchat offered something new and desirable. All of them had predecessors with network effects and still succeeded by giving users something they really wanted. They didn't throw their hands up and blame users.
Surprisingly though, Signal is gaining a bit of traction, so I think "Privacy" is still something people do want. But it has to be better defined.
And to be completely honest I don't believe in Signal. The current messenger wars kind of feel like a parallel universe's email wars "yahoo vs gmail vs hotmail vs live" or something. Coming up with a new messenger is easy. Most of them have the same featuresets. The underlying protocols should be compatible instead of this sorry state of affairs.
Matrix will probably win out in the end but it's going to be long-drawn and unnecessarily annoying for users in the mean time. It shouldn't matter if you're using instagram's UI, or messenger's, or signal's, …. You should get access to the contacts you want, and be able to cross-talk.
Only way to really take power back is make an app better than what's on the market, and have it respect your privacy. A very, very tall order, but I think it's the only way we can really take power away from big tech and give it back to the people.
I don't think you can win by just having a better app. Marketing plays a big role. So something like Signal is going to be a major underdog because OSS and freeware don't have the same cashflow to do marketing. What I'm trying to say is that we need to be that marketing. Talking about data and privacy _is_ that marketing.
- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters - opening Signal displays empty frame far too long - it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls - forwarding message from chat to chat is not working - messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.
And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.
I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to stop short of asking people to switch, and just try to get them to install it (and maybe even get them to casually suggest their friends do the same, if the opportunity arises). It's a hopefully small, risk-free step to take, and the more people that have installs, the more likely it is that "no one is there" will start becoming not true, even if not immediately.
Pidgin with a shitton of plugins. If the only problem is the migration, that still works as a single client, albeit with drawbacks and hiccups. (I collected them at https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins and yes, it'll need to be compiled, even Pidgin itself for some of the solutions. There's nothing user friendly about it, sadly.)
On the other hand... the only system I never had to migrate off is IRC. The funny bit of IRC is that it's not private in terms of security at all, but because it's anonymus, it still feels like it.
And so I keep thinking about needs when it comes to privacy: what do I really need in the context of internet communication? Anonymity, privacy, or both?
I don't have a definitive answer.
Like many people, I'd definitely prefer having just one messenger, but now I simply use Signal with everyone that's on it and only have to open WhatsApp a few times a week. This entire thing has to be seen as a process IMO.
Still waiting for that to be the case. After 6 years of using Signal, I have a whopping... two... people in my contacts who also use it.
The most common response is still "Why don't you just use Whatsapp?"
Pretty much the only way we're going to see critical mass with Signal is if someone like Google were to make it their default platform for messaging.
Because in the end normal users think about the functionality and price first, everything else second. Privacy? Just a neat-sounding bonus you can feel good about if your favorite app includes it and don't care about if it doesn't.
I think the most important factor here is network effects.
Some are very loyal to the Zuckerberg offerings. They ride or die with the Zuckster.
Most of them have been busted, multiple times.
It comes down to risk exposure, gotta make a deal with one devil, but you don't want a dozen bad actors ganging up on your data.
I like the sites and apps that accept my data as currency so that I can use/browse them without getting out my wallet. Plus I like seeing ads for products that I might want to buy. Win win.
"we" care, up to the point of "it's too much effort", and "we" have tried to do a grassroots movement to get people to use more privacy-focused apps.
But these apps, in the end, are still owned by companies who are not charities; they want to earn money, and digitally, it feels like you can only make money by selling subscriptions, ads, or printing a cryptocurrency - and subscriptions don't work because of (sponsored / investor funded) free alternatives.
Anyway, if you put legislation in place like in Europe, the companies will have no choice. In theory anyway; in practice they find and abuse loopholes soon enough, or just do things covertly, hope they won't be found out, and just pay the fine if something does come up. Which they can easily afford by then, not so much from the money they earn from their monetization method, but stock market value.
I think there should only be legislation about stuff people care about.
What makes you say people don't?
Or similar? Because as far as HN bubble/bias/hivemind goes "We like privacy, we like to complain, we dislike cryptocurrency scams" would be a fitting (though partial) description.
So people irritated by that change by Signal being heavily represented on HN is not surprising.
Needless to say all the fax machine companies went out of business because no one wanted internet features associated with their faxes.
Honestly, this is a bad argument. You can use Signal and never send a gif or stickers. You don't have to do anything with ~~stickers~~crypto when using Signal. It is an opt-in feature that is probably going to not be used my 90% of people. This is just a bad argument surrounding the whole ordeal.
Now the arguments about: regulations, Moxie's involvement (stated he has no coins but there's other potential issues), and how the final system will actually look like (e.g. should it be a second app), those are valid arguments that we should be discussing. But the above one just isn't great and I'm tired of seeing it.
Contrived strawman rebuttal: Government sees app "ThingX" now deals with crypto. ThingX indicates that different variants of the app can interact with crypto depending on the region. Government doesn't care because they're not tech savvy, bans ThingX because crypto.
Although ultimately the effect is similar to "claiming" them by virtue of being the only one (as long as you don't share the private key of course) that can operate on those one and zeroes (i.e transfering them to some other address).
Unlike, say, copyright, where even if you claim ownership, someone else can also operate on it (e.g. piracy), illegally of course, but still can.
I’m not arguing that position but I’m just saying that if that is the case, then their boycott is more reasonable than say a “stickers” boycott.
Seriously, most mining farms are using geothermal or water dams generators.
Yeah there is a big education gap that just gets wider with stigma.
This series of short articles is very good for those who want to learn the fundamentals: https://tomerstrolight.medium.com/why-bitcoin-the-series-660...
It is a protective heuristic for the non-tech people.
Basically, the more something mentions crypto coins, the higher the likelihood that it is a scam of some type.
It is not always true, but it is true enough for the average person and , in general, functions pretty well as a heuristic.
Thus, they hear about this new, previously unknown, chat service, and see an association with crypto coins, their scam detector immediately goes off, and they don’t want anything to do with it.
Yes, it may take a while, but the glacier does in fact move.
No, it is a very good argument. Those who are using computers since pre-mobile era (which is everyone but zoomers) remember very well how simple programs slowly became more bloated and then basically became adware. This is what it is associated to.
In general, boycotting the product is the time-tested way to send messages to big corp. if you don’t like your clothes being made by child labor, don’t buy the brand. If you don’t like WhatsApp privacy policy, don’t install it. If you don’t like P&G spying on people in China, don’t buy their products. And if you don’t like cryptocurrencies, don’t use stuff from companies which support them.
The next step plan is to move to Dendrite, which is a new homeserver taking the lessons learned from writing Synapse, as well as being implemented in Go instead of Python. But it doesn't yet do everything. You can try a dendrite-hosted server by using dendrite.matrix.org as your homeserver. (AFAIK it has its own accounts.)
I think of myself as a technophile but element/matrix/riot made me eat the humble pie.
Now I still don’t want to use WhatsApp but I don’t know which other messaging app will replace it. I think none.
Whether or not a bunch of competent security gurus on HN assure us that yes, Signal is still great and no, Moxie didn't go nuts, doesn't really influence the validity of that argument outside tech circles. Don't forget that we've all spent years training our aunts and nephews to not trust the companies that make the apps they use. It's a major marketing mistake and they should've known better.
Also, ApplePay has nowhere near the same stigma associated with it as cryptocurrencies do, I think your comparison is silly.
FWIW, if Signal was new today and someone would pitch me "a super secure messaging app with built-in crypto payments" I'd not easily get enthusiastic. I've been trained to treat any pitch that includes the word "crypto" or "token" with high suspicion, because of the crap magnets those technologies have been historically. Too many people's "get rich quick" schemes sounded exactly like that a few years ago.
trust only works in retrospect (it can't be extended into the future to a party simply because they make a promise)
all such relationships have an expiry date (since as the trusted party evolves or needs to reinvent itself to satisfy shareholders). what can prevent this are bullet-proof contracts (that's not how people make decisions though - they never read the fine-print, review it when it changes and instead work on gut-feeling and emotions).
putting your trust into a brand/product is always going to eventually hurt you. A product having reached the size of Signal will most certainly throw part of it's user-base to the curb if it thinks it's held back by their opinions/goals.
The disconnect is people thinking Signal owes them something (when everybody actually used it for free until now).
Nonsense. Trust provides a basis for present and future dealings.
I highly recommend Robert Cialdini before making opinionated comments on trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...
I don't trust you.
And several other serious problems.
You are being incredibly close-minded and only listing the cons of cryptocurrencies.
The fact is that many people have negative associations with crypto. Even if they're wrong, it's still going to be bad marketing for Signal.
My sole contact with cryptocurrencies is endless spam in mailbox, endless scam attempts in communities that I moderate and information about ICO and other scams. And <s>investments</s> gambling. And very rare cases of cryptocurrencies being useful for something.
And repeated info about being utter failure for payments. For comparison cash/credit card payment is done within 20 seconds for cc and within minute for cash. Both at cost of below 0.01 $ for payment.
To me it looks like people here are vastly overreacting.
1. multi-vendor, open standard protocol for E2EE group messaging
2. reference open-source clients for web, desktop & mobile
3. reference open-source server
The IETF standard is MLS and it will live alongside TLS, https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/. The team behind Wire founded Skype and contributed to the first patent-free high-def audio codec (OPUS), which in turn enabled WebRTC, the protocol behind most modern video conferencing services. Matrix.org provides #2 and #3 and has stated that they will migrate to the IETF MLS standard protocol.
Since both Wire and Matrix offer both OSS clients & servers, and there is active multi-vendor development on an open standard protocol for E2EE group messaging, web & mobile developers have multiple options for open-source contribution. Matrix already supports federated servers that can be self-hosted, and they recently supported the FOSDEM online conference with ~30,000 attendees, https://matrix.org/blog/2021/02/15/how-we-hosted-fosdem-2021...
> The most unique thing about Matrix is that conversations get replicated across all servers whose users are present in the conversation, so there's never a single point of control or failure for a conversation (much as git repositories get replicated between all contributors). And so hosting FOSDEM in Matrix meant that everyone already on Matrix (including users bridged to Matrix from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord etc) could attend directly - in addition to users signing up for the first time on the FOSDEM server.
That's by far the hardest part, and I'm skeptical it will happen anytime soon. I suspect things will shift eventually as the market changes (e.g. the shift from desktop to mobile), but I doubt it will be toward openness absent government regulation the forces it.
I continue to have individual conversations on signal with most friends, but the idea of being able to leave whatsapp seems to be much tougher than I thought.
Given Signal's behavior, I am not going to waste any friendship capital trying to convince my friends to switch to Signal.
[0]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/send-payments-in-india-with-whatsa...
I noticed something very similar. About 25% of one-on-one conversations are now in Signal. Another 25% are in iMessage, which is a very easy sell for iOS users.
I've had a terrible time with group chats. One large chat is occurring in iMessage (very poor experience). Another large chat is occurring in Discord, which has been fantastic, but it changes the dynamic and caused a few friends to ghost (the onboarding to Discord is harder for newcomers vs. iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal IMO).
It is reasonable to assume that every single chat and every single DM is logged in plaintext by Discord for all time.
When was this? There was a migration from groupv1 to groupv2 which could explain it. I've always found it stable personally (including during migration). At any rate, it should be better now that there are less changes.
Given Signal's recent changes in direction, I'm considering just giving up on it and sticking with WhatsApp.
The difference with me is that my server has a dozen users and I could rebuild the whole thing from backups on a brand new provider in a couple hours if I needed to. I doubt I'll need to, though. It's not exactly working hard. :D
I cut all of FB and their ecosystem out of my life years ago. Can’t say this one person out of billions has had an effect on the company but at least I can honestly say I’m not even a tiny part of the problem.
I don't proselytize to normal people anymore because most just aren't receptive to the message. It's like an addiction. Even when they agree with me, everyone has their little excuses as to why they can't possibly quit. And at the end of the day your one-one-billionth share of the problem amounts to peanuts, anyway.
well, it requires sacrifice on your part to stop messaging your friends. Most people would not give up their friends for "the greater good" of stopping privacy intrusion (which won't have an effect until the majority of people give up whatsapp first).
I can see why most people won't fight the good fight.
If anything, leaving Facebook was a wake-up call as to who my very good friends were.
I strongly believe that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are extremely harmful to social cohesion and mental health.
i don't care what or how your life is - this discussion is about the general case. Not everyone has a rich social life, and these messaging apps/services do help people engage with others which would otherwise have not.
And to change can be disruptive - casually dismissing these concerns is not the way to solve the problem connected with these platforms.
Please try and be a little kinder.
I'm not dismissing these concerns. The social harms of these platforms far outweigh whatever gains are wrung from them. They are a net negative to society and to public discourse, full stop. The longer we defend the legitimate reasons people have to stay netizens of these platforms, the darker their shadow weighs over our consciousness.
My country has a former prime minister on Facebook's oversight board because everyone here uses Facebook. That's not in anyone's interest but Facebook's because now it's convinced us that it can be brought to heel, as if it was Facebook, the company, that was the problem.
That's a treacherous misdiagnosis: the issue is the platform itself. It must be dismantled if society is going to heal from the psychic traumas unknowingly and knowingly caused by our participation.
Network lock-in is real. I think a lot of people who disconnect from fb also disregard the difficulty. Even if you don't like the barman, your local is wherever your buddies hang out.
Though I'll admit, getting people to switch to Signal was a lot of work. People like Elon and Joe Rogan helped onboard a lot of the people that were holding out. One group chat has a member that is only there because everyone else bought in and he complains, but uses it (big WA user).
I don't think people calling for disconnecting are unaware of the difficulties. Ripping off a bandaid hurts, but the thought of ripping it off often is more painful than the actual experience.
The migration to Signal has two parts: start using Signal, and delete your Facebook accounts.
I think if those platforms made some story-like feature, I'd have an easier time leaving WhatsApp.
For me it's the other way around.
I've stopped using all platforms which offers that "feature", because I find it distracting and annoying.
Even if I break my promise you could just use a fork of my app since XMPP servers don’t prevent third party clients from connecting.
¹: I don’t have to either because I have a working business model that’s not a ponzi scheme
I think this is bad. But also a general tendency: Accumulations of data are valuable to companies which exploit them. Larger accumulations of data are even more valuable, in a non-linear way. This is because data sets are multi-dimensional, and the more dimensions you have, the more information you can get out of it, even if the users initially have never thought about that. So, if you have two large accumulations of data, and you join them, you get extra value.
Google is doing this aggregation as well, as mentioned in its terms of service.
You also see that in they way Microsoft is trying to link business and personal accounts via Lynx and so on. You also see that with platforms like LinkedIn (which was bought by Microsoft).
In other words, it works a bit like gravity. Mass attracts other masses and more mass attracts even more mass. And what we will end up is a kind of black hole in which everything is collapsing into the same place.
Without effective regulation, one day, Facebook's data and Google's data will probably be combined.
BTW I am also skeptic whether some of the reported "data leaks" are not in reality covered-up data sales. As long as there are no substantial consequences, like criminal sentences, to people who do that, there are very few barriers to exploiting personal data in this way.
Can you elaborate on why you think this might happen? It doesn't seem like an obvious outcome to me.
Here is a comment with some defense of all of this, for those who were only reading the big headlines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875802
And for what: so that the only mass-market end-to-end encrypted messaging tool could be discredited? And we could prove to large companies "we don't care if you are end-to-end encrypted: in fact, we will punish you harder if you are end-to-end encrypted than if you are just a normal service!"?!? Where is all the continued outrage over Snapchat, the service we actually should be trying to replace with an e2e encrypted alternative (but for which Signal is an insufficient replacement as a big reason people like Snapchat is that you don't have to give your real phone number to the random people you talk to online)? While some people remind us that Telegram sucks, where are the weekly threads and news articles about how horrible Telegram is? Why are groups like Signal targeting advertising at WhatsApp instead of at Telegram? Hell: why is everyone so upset over WhatsApp, but no one ever mentions Facebook Messenger in any of these articles or rants?
And let us not forget the cherry on top of this whole thing: that right after everyone decided to do this massive mobilization to cause the great exodus from WhatsApp--only some of those people of course ending up on Signal, with some reasonable number likely moving to Snapchat or Telegram or even Facebook Messenger--Signal decided they had a great moment to launch MobileCoin... a cryptocurrency whose claim to fame is being built on broken-by-design DRM technology (Intel SGX / ARM TrustZone) and which--whether you think cryptocurrency is a good idea (which I do) or not--has managed to undermine confidence not only in the only big open source end-to-end encrypted messenger (by both clouding its motives and tying it to cryptocurrencies, which many end users consider to be a scam) but which has now soured everyone's opinion (maybe correctly) of the privacy community (due to the recent push to use it). This is all just so infuriating as someone who wants people to universally have end-to-end encryption :/.
(FWIW, if there is something new here--something that Facebook is now suddenly doing that is actually bad, unlike before--I'm very curious, but am going to note that all of the above is now the reason why I'm even past the point of caring enough than to skim a few paragraphs to verify "this is part of the same FUD from a couple months ago": you can only cry wolf so many times before even the super technical people like me are no long going to care. But this just seems to now be "great, government is now going to step in and also punish WhatsApp for having the gall to have bothered to build an end-to-end encrypted messaging app and then be carefully transparent about the process by which they add a new feature that just shouldn't be considered a big problem". When this same politician decides to sanction Snapchat or Telegram for the way they handle privacy--or goes after Facebook Messenger or Instagram--I'll be excited, but this is going to harm the efforts for end-to-end encryption, not help them!)
the whole "but the privacy policy changes weren't that bad!!!" to which I say: it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. People didn't want their metadata harvestsed by FB, and this was a convenient time to jump.
FB apologists will be quick to note that FB had access to WA metadata for years unless if you dug through some menus for an opt-out button (now removed). I have no clue how they think this is a compelling argument.
Just because the dam hasn't broken yet doesn't mean that you can't keep chizzling away at it. eventually it'll break. I'd argue that WA would have never been in this mess if they stayed as an arms-length corporation and were left to their own devices. But no: FB has an immediate desire to gather the biggest heap of user data possible. As they should: it's how they make their money. But that doesn't mean people aren't allowed protest.
This undermines trust to the argument. It looks more like it aims for a knee-jerk reaction, all emotion, zero thought. If you don a large enough tinfoil hat, you can even imagine for a second that somebody is trying to scare away more users from the largest e2ee platform out there, so that they would land on less secure platforms — but of course I'm no RMS to suggest such outlandish things.
Which is to say, "you're only allowed to me mad about a change when it's rolled out" is not a theory I buy into.
The reason the exodus happened was not "because" of the privacy change, in the same way the dam didn't break because a squirrel running across knocked the "last piece" loose.
Years of negligence are responsible.
Who cares what they say their intent is?
It was so clearly, so obviously written to deceive, I wonder whether the defenders have ever actually read the new privacy agreements they are supposed to sign.
It says that in the future (e.g. as soon as the EU allows it), Facebook will merge all Whatsapp and Facebook data. And it will share whatever it can do now.
They do NOT say they will not share the data with Facebook. They use the same sentence, carefully worded, saying that they don't share the data right now, but might later.
Why the funk do you think they write it that way?
Some people also believe sentences like this: "We at company X deeply care about your privacy".
Not everyone is so naive.
I've never heard of wire, so I doubt any of my friends or family have either
I'm hoping the future is a migration to a protocol such as Matrix, rather than users endlessly hoping from one product to another until they get sold out.
Swiping or hitting the back key to leave a chat, entering a chat from the group/contact list, and tapping on a notification to reply in-app is absolutely painful.
Some inspired soul will say "Great! That's a golden opportunity for a Matrix bridge!" And it would be, if that wasn't explicitly against Wire's ToS. As such, it's the absolute dog of an app, or nothing. iOS must be better though, as nobody else has suggested switching. And between poor performance on Wire, or all the drawbacks of Whatsapp, I know which one I choose.
https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/144258-what-is-rcs-m...
Because SMS leaves a lot on the table. It is okay if you want to send just text but doesn't support rich features such as reactions, replies various forms of formatting or media. It is also very insecure. iMessage and RCS provide more but have their own limitations particularly across platforms.
Furthermore other messaging apps provide a wide variety of features and aren't tied to (often temporary) identifiers such as phone numbers.
So SMS may be sufficient for many people but I'm surprised that you haven't encountered people using other communications tools that are much more full featured.
I can't imaging asking a friend or relative to install an app so that I can message them. I'm sure the response would be "you can already message me". I send text. I send photos. I guess I could install it on both of my phones and message myself to see what it adds. I'm just having a hard time imaging what it could be.
https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-whatsapp-set...
Not many options to be neutral in the spying game if the EU is ruled out.
Telegram has really, really great UI/UX and even DX regarding their API. Other than that it's a shit show.
I would never recommend using Whatsapp, but compared to Telegram, Whatsapp is a poster child.
Is it because of SS7 confirmation of pins or what are you referring to?
Not sure where you got that number, but in 2013 (before aquisition) they reported ~$10 million in revenue. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...)
They brought in $15 million in the first half of 2014. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...)
They only had 55 employees at acquisition.
They might not have become a unicorn... but there most definitely was a path to profitability.
Also that document shows a net loss of $230 million in that same period, so not exactly on a strong path to profitability.
- A large chunk of the world (especially people in developing countries) will be unwilling to pay anything more than $0.
- Even if they want to pay, most of those users won't have a payment method set up. How many of their 2 billion+ users have a credit card or even a bank account?
I agree that their losses were surprisingly high at the time... especially given how lean their engineering team and operations were supposed to be. (https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011/?lang=en)
Even just giving paid users some small extra features or a little icon by their name or something small would have been enough to get people willingly give a dollar rather than their approach of trying to charge people.
They only charged some users, not everyone, because they couldn't figure out how to do it.. and who got charged was relatively random.
Those that did get charged could just complain and the subscription fee would just go away.
Value is one thing, but only charging a fraction of your customer base at what seemingly felt like random was never going to gain public acceptance.
I don't even think they even had a plan for how to deal with poorer nations in Africa where the app is exremely popular.
What about Keybase, though? This thread reminded me of its existence and I just renewed it on my iPhone...
Because the business was "sell to fb," effectively. Whoever succeeds in putting together a wide network of people will face similar incentives. I suppose someone could do it Craig Newmark style, but for that a Craig Newmark needs to be CEO of a major app company. Long odds.
We have the alternatives already. We can use them now. To me this defeatism is like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and saying "I guess there's nothing to be done now." It starts with you making the decision to use something else. It is harder because of the lock in. But there's only one way to do it.
However Threema exists. It is paid up front and otherwise fairly boring: https://threema.ch/en
I think this here is the key point, that it was built 10 years ago when smartphones were just catching up and general public needed one working and stable chatting app. Replicating that is not the issue here but making people switch from their "used-to" app is. Not saying that is right or wrong but I get where most of the people are coming from. These apps are now intertwined with normal lives who are either unaware or don't care about their privacy. Also making that switching harder by incorporating more popular apps together like facebook-instagram, facebook-whatsapp doesn't help either.
Bar of what is acceptable was raised.
Windows 3.1 was extremely impressive when released and got popular.
Releasing equivalent of Windows 3.1 in 2021 will not be impressive or popular.
Now im a happy matrix camper. Didnt even bother with signal because meh mobile requirement and their dishonest Foss policy.
Signal has done it repeatedly as well (no federation etc) but I’ve always ignored it and let it slide but for f’s sake this thing is not even open source really!
There are other platforms which are more than good enough.
/s if not obv, I'm making fun of people defending the App Store, yet when FB is in question are blatantly showing their hypocrisy.