Or just delete Facebook apps.
If you don't have an issue with Facebook then disregard and continue using their services. If you do have a problem then try being the change you want to see. Tend your garden. You cannot control other people but you can control yourself.
Being the change you want to see doesn't automatically mean the world changes. It just means live with principles regardless of external factors. You don't like Facebook? Then don't use Facebook. It's as simple as that. Others can take it or leave it.
I just see it as people complaining about Facebook while continuing to use Facebook so it must not be a very big deal to them.
2. Lead a movement to switch away from these apps. This has an insanely high overhead, and requires significant organisation of people and a large individual commitment. This would have a significant effect on Facebook.
This is how I view the problem. This is not an example of people being unwilling to act on their ideals. It's a situation where acting on their ideals would cause them a significant burden with no effect, and causing the intended change would require ridiculously large effort.
This is irrelevant to me and can be left out. My goal is not to hurt Facebook but to not betray my principles.
It’s hard though, because what alternative do people have?
I didn’t log in to my Facebook account for 7 years, and I got way out of touch with most of my old friends in different cities.
Sure, occasionally people get frustrated that you are not on these platforms, however I ended up being lot more responsive and attentive to non social media forms of communication. Social media is usually low effort, I rather have one person wishing me with personal email on my birthday, rather than hundreds of meaningless FB posts.
It was actually harder for business contacts than personal, customers want to chat in whatever works for them, harder to say no to someone paying you. However Teams/Slack has helped a lot and dose of compliance reasons which customers find easier to go along with.
Deleting the Facebook owned applications from my phone would achieve close to nothing positive. I may convince a few family members and good friends to use another application only for me, but I will lose a lot of relations and Facebook wouldn't care. However I also did work in small research studies to expose to everyone the bad practices of some companies about privacy. It's not much but it helps when our governments make laws such as the GDPR.
Even if SMS is expensive, email is still quite free. It works almost like SMS/messaging on phone, you get push notifications on your phone and you respond.
I move around about countries every few months, keeping a VOIP/Skype phone number as the number anyone can reach you at works for me, while my local number is more for getting an internet connection and occasionally for signups to local apps (like rideshares, food delivery etc) that reject some VoIP numbers .
See Beeper (bridges to various chat apps based on Matrix.org): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
I agree that FOSS doesn't solve all ills. It's a necessary step, though.
Everything is closed source, and you have no idea what is running on their servers, etc, so all your suppositions are worth basically nothing.
But a MITM should still be visible
More details?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/26/iran-blocks-signal-...
Q: Why would Iran block Signal but not WhatsApp if they actually use the exact same protocol? A: Because Facebook has cut a deal with the regime to give them access to things they could not get access to with Signal
I suppose it could be that blocking WhatsApp would cause too much disruption, so the Iranian regime tolerates it for now, but I put much more weight on Facebook just rolling over.
There are other instances of WhatsApp being allowed and other allegedly as-secure platforms being banned. It could be chance or network effects, but my guess is that Facebook has built in tools to comply with those regimes' spying demands. Perhaps they even push locale-specific versions of the app.
It’s probably done on the device, with suspicious links and media sent to the servers for further inspection.
We are also sure some of their engineers worked on methods to detect bypasses on the checks.
It’s a leak of data and metadata, a privacy invasion for sure, but not comparable to a MITM.
Why do you believe them?
Even if you put in no personal data to FB at all they create a ghost profile that will be very accurate based on who you are connected to.
Good thing that Beeper lets you self-host their (AGPLd) bridges.
Legally, I’m not sure how you can have it both ways, aside from either FB offering a paid tier (you pay cash instead of providing your data), or we shut FB down entirely.
What exactly do you believe is the solution?
Personally, I think social media is more harm than good. I don’t want to ban or control social media companies (my local officials aren’t even capable of keeping drugs and homeless addicts off school grounds, let alone dictating internet regulation). My personal choice is to not use it.
EDIT:
> And There’s FaceTime if your far from friend. Stop relying on Facebook to connect you…
I'm not even sure to describe how ignorant this comment is. Even if I stop relying on Facebook to connect me. Now I'm relying to Apple to connect me? Am I supposed to tell me friends that because I don't use Facebook, they should all buy an iPhone to connect with me?
Is phone and SMS considered 'difficult' now? Everyone I know simply uses SMS and phone calls.
I suppose if you have globally distributed friends groups, this could be difficult, otherwise I don't see why. You give up a few features and it's not the most secure but it's a viable alternative almost everyone has access to.
Plus, phone calls are quite different from general text messages. Messages allows anyone to reply on a time they’re free for it.
So in general, yes, SMS is considered difficult, in my situation.
The main thing that WhatsApp and Messenger gave me was the ability to stay in touch with anyone I knew, wherever they lived. SMS just doesn’t cut it; huge fees and no groups. There’s really no alternative.
It is kind of funny as every Andriod or iOS phone user effectively gets an email account as part of their access to the platform so it not like this generation doesn't have email.
Also everyone uses email for app registrations, bank accounts and for some formal communication so it not like they don't know how to use either.
It seems we have forgotten that we did live abroad and kept in touch via tools with no vendor lock twenty years ago, telecom (SMS/phone) was lot more expensive then as well.
Ultimately use what you like if you find WhatsApp more useful sure, however forcing a vendor locked in platform on to others I find is incredibly rude.
I am not forcing you to lock into a vendor when I call/SMS/email you.
I haven’t forgotten the days of SMS/email, it’s just that instant messaging made things a lot easier.
If you want large groups/numbers of people to do something, you have to make it as easy and frictionless as possible for them.
fill it in with alternate contacts
start using those contacts to reach out
wait until they switch too
???
profit!
I do have a few members of the family on Signal already though. They're just the ones that don't mind giving up stickers and the nice interface
About the time they added stickers, and message replies my friends group chats switched over.
I have no doubt signal will catch up though.
Family and friends adapted, most without prompting.
I'd say try it but be prepared for an ego check if nobody follows haha
I can't even figure out how to use it from my mobile device without installing an app.
I believe that's deliberate. The mobile web version of Facebook used to support personal messaging. In 2016 they removed it in an effort to push people onto the app.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/03/facebook-is-disabling-mess...
Going to https://mbasic.facebook.com/messages gets me the following:
> Your Page's Inbox is not currently available in the > Facebook app or mobile web browsers. You can access > your messages through a desktop browser, or by > downloading Facebook Business Suite or Messenger > from the app store.
In one comment on HN[0], a user suggested:
> You may need to access the page by clicking a link > from another mbasic page in order to have some kind > of checksum in the URL.
Another user replied that they were able to get access to the page with that method[1], but I haven't been able to replicate it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402316 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402354
It even has some extra features, like LaTeX support.
I guess you mean it doesn't work on mobile browsers? (Never tried that)
They removed that feature at the time their last big messenger outage happened.
messenger.com still works on Android Firefox as long as you switch to desktop mode.
Not sure for how long though, as it looks as if they are constantly sabotaging their platform. ..and it shows: Facebook Messenger feels far less relevant than maybe ten years ago.
In my German peer group everyone now uses either WhatsApp or Signal for private and Teams+email for work related communication.
It’s basic (like it says on the tin) but it works. I use it to avoid having to install the app, for all of them reasons discussed.
my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.
Living in a country where local social networks are more popular with general population than foreign ones (Russia), I'd rather prefer FAANG. "Local companies" may sound good because the word "local" has some nice connotations, like your "local store" or "local coffee shop". But in reality, "local companies" do all the bad stuff that Facebook does, and also go above and beyond to cooperate with the state against the protesters or any political dissidents. And they're also not as good at writing software, so these networks have significantly worse design and a lot more bugs.
There are millions of example where people want to solve a problem, think that they will be able to do it with government regulation, and end up with a situation that is much worse. But even among them, this is a case where it could only make situation worse. And much, much worse.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, let's stick to the better one of the bad choices we have.
This is the basic idea behind zero-knowledge systems using homomorphic encryption to do very cool things.
One reason is because a lot of phone plans include few or no calls/SMS but include unlimited Whatsapp. When one app is completely ubiquitous in a society and free, people will simply not understand why you want to do something a different way and will often wonder if you’re trying to scam them.
I do not like that Google get to know when I need to visit the hospital, or collect information about my children's activities in school. But currently we do not have an option.
we 'd be truly screwed if crappy WA would be adamand for such in any given country, even Putinocchio's, Xi's or KJU's. that country 'd be even more crappier than WA, and all FB-associated, which in turn would be quite an achievement on quite a, literally and metaphorically, negative scale in its own right
Can't change my profile picture in the Messenger app though, so would need to reactivate if I felt the urgent need to.