What worries me is FB is in charge. It’s allegedly secure, but closed source.
What’s their profit model here anyway?
What’s their profit model here anyway?
SMS providers are unreliable and expensive, it's eating their business.
Is it actually though? At least in the UK I still get every business message (delivery notifications, booking confirmations etc.) via SMS. I haven't received a single one via WhatsApp. And WhatsApp has 100% penetration here so that isn't a barrier.
A lot of this became public from FTC vs Meta: https://www.businessinsider.com/ftc-facebook-lawsuit-makes-z...
That's why it insists so badly on having full access to your contacts.
> We need your contacts to provide the service, but don’t share your contacts with Meta.
> improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products;
It is absolutely true that WhatsApp collects your contacts' phone numbers and your social graph. Unless WhatsApp has stopped doing that, in which case it should make a big announcement.
I don't know if the social graph is used outside WhatsApp, so that part may not be true, but it is within the privacy policy to do so (at least the one I see, EU may have a different one), the privacy policy says WhatsApp may share information with Meta to among other things:
> improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products;
And there have been waves of policy updates, notifications etc specifically to get these terms. That doesn't mean Find my Friends gets this information, but I thought there was at least discussion of it.
> We need your contacts to provide the service, but don’t share your contacts with Meta.
I'm frustrated that people even at HN allow themselves to indulge in conspiracy theories that would be immediately whistle-blowed or reported on. There are thousands of people that work on or with WhatsApp and related products within Meta who would notice, not to mention all the data separation audits that happen.
There are plenty of ways to make this statement 100% factual and still effectively leak the user's address book, at least in a form useful to Meta. It is true that Meta doesn't need your raw contacts, it just needs certain inferences made from them. WhatsApp can perfectly well make those inferences and only share those, with some trivially-reversed "anonymization" on top as an extra layer of obfuscation.
What you're saying is either an outright lie you are telling us, or a lie you have been told and are yourself choosing to believe to feel better about working for them, or to not put yourself at risk by digging deeper and finding adverse information (which once you know it you may be required to blow the whistle or find yourself legally complicit in the matter).
Basic economics suggests there is no reason Meta (then-Facebook) would pay what it had paid for WhatsApp for "just" a messaging app, especially before it was as entrenched as it is now (and so could trivially be dethroned by Facebook's own offering). They did so because unlike Facebook, people trusted WhatsApp with access to their contacts and that information is extremely important for Meta.
Source: also worked at meta and had full access to WhatsApps codebase, like most engineers at meta
users data, perhaps? your data feed into FB's machine. I'm sure they will figured out how to make money.