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Apps that force you to give them (and everyone else) your phone numbers for .. ummm ... "contact discovery" and yet talk about privacy are a bit of a contradict

by lrei 11y ago

Apps that force you to give them (and everyone else) your phone numbers for .. ummm ... "contact discovery" and yet talk about privacy are a bit of a contradiction. No plausible reason for why apps like WhatsApp (and Signal) couldn't use e-mail addresses for this. Or at least provide it as an alternative. It's even problematic for people who change phone numbers, have multiple phones, want to use desktop clients, etc My opinion: if it requires a phone number, it's not really interested in privacy. Move on.

BhavdeepSethi 11y ago
I feel there is no relation to privacy here. It's also the practical choice. Emails can be easily created to by people pretending to be someone else. If you have someone's number on your phone, there is a good chance you have communicated with them before and have thus done some authentication. You can keep creating new email ids to spam people. That becomes very difficult with numbers.
- lrei 11y ago
  Sure there is. My phone number is private information. And it can trivially be traced back to me (no possibility of anonymity). I don't necessarily want to share it with everyone I want to talk to. Or every company that makes a chat app. I'm pretty sure Snowden didn't start out by giving his phone number around... Plus every successful chat app before WhatsApp (from ICQ, XMPP apps, MS Messenger, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger) was fine without this requirement. Is the hypothesis that it is now impossible to have a successful chat app without it being tied to a phone number? We are not discussing a convenience "option" the user can skip but rather a requirement for these apps to work.
  - pfg 11y ago
    WhatsApp is a mobile messaging app. It's a drop-in replacement for SMS. There would be absolutely no reason for anyone to use WhatsApp if they were just another chat app with their own contact discovery that's not based on phone numbers. Their market share would be miniscule. No one is forcing you to use a messaging app which is using your phone number as an identifier to contact anyone you don't want to see your phone number.
    - lrei 11y ago
      No one is forcing anyone to make claims about privacy either. 1) New social networks tend to replace old social networks: I'm not forced to use it but, for example, I can't go back to XMPP because others don't use it anymore. Meaning the option is not to communicate. 2) If everyone, including open-source developers (e.g. Signal), are doing this now and no-one is developing alternatives that run on modern platforms and are easy to use in non error-prone way w/o phone numbers, what exactly are the options even disregarding social network effects? 3) I doubt it's fully clear to many people what can be inferred from metadata related being trivial to prove who they spoke to and when. E.g. if it had been trivial for the NSA to know that one of its contractors was chatting with reporters it would've been game over for Snowden. In courts, circumstantial evidence like this can still be (and has been) used to imply guilt. Implying privacy under these circumstances seems unwise. 4) WhatsApp is mobile, fast, reliable and easy to use; Most of their competition at the time it launched and even now can't match that. This includes FB Messenger, Skype, Google, MS Messenger, etc I'm not sure it is proven that their success is entirely due to phone numbers. I've seen lots of people exchange phone numbers just for whatsapp.
      - pfg 11y ago
        > 1) New social networks tend to replace old social networks: I'm not forced to use it but, for example, I can't go back to XMPP because others don't use it anymore. Meaning the option is not to communicate. Right, but this is a mobile messaging app. There are still hundreds of desktop (or: not primarily mobile) messaging apps out there, many of which are very popular, and they're not going away any time soon. Phone numbers are how mobile phones are usually identified, and to ask a mobile messaging app to use something else for identification is, to put it bluntly, quite silly. > 2) If everyone, including open-source developers (e.g. Signal), are doing this now and no-one is developing alternatives that run on modern platforms and are easy to use in non error-prone way w/o phone numbers, what exactly are the options even disregarding social network effects? There's nothing in the protocol that forces anyone to use phone numbers as identifiers. The current users of the Signal protocol just happen to be mobile messaging apps, where it makes sense to use phone numbers as identifiers. > 3) I doubt it's fully clear to many people what can be inferred from metadata related being trivial to prove who they spoke to and when. E.g. if it had been trivial for the NSA to know that one of its contractors was chatting with reporters it would've been game over for Snowden. In courts, circumstantial evidence like this can still be (and has been) used to imply guilt. Implying privacy under these circumstances seems unwise. Now you're talking about metadata, and that's a different topic entirely. Merely using a pseudonym instead of your phone number as an identifier is going to do exactly nothing to prevent any of the things you mentioned. If you want to hide your metadata, you should be looking at something like vuvuzela[1]. No one claimed that WhatsApp is doing any of that. > 4) WhatsApp is mobile, fast, reliable and easy to use; Most of their competition at the time it launched and even now can't match that. This includes FB Messenger, Skype, Google, MS Messenger, etc I'm not sure it is proven that their success is entirely due to phone numbers. I've seen lots of people exchange phone numbers just for whatsapp. I'd argue that they wouldn't have been able to reach critical mass without phone number-based contact discovery. That they were the only ones who did it right at the time doesn't mean the two aren't related. [1]: https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela
  - rtkwe 11y ago
    The trade-off here is to make it seamlessly fit into the place of SMS. The only thing the WhatsApp or Signal KNOWS that you have for all of your SMS contacts is the phone number. It's very possible to make a chat app that doesn't use this number but then contact discovery becomes a harder issue and people are less likely to use it if it requires them to recreate their whole contact list.

by lrei 11y ago

BhavdeepSethi 11y ago

I feel there is no relation to privacy here. It's also the practical choice. Emails can be easily created to by people pretending to be someone else. If you have someone's number on your phone, there is a good chance you have communicated with them before and have thus done some authentication. You can keep creating new email ids to spam people. That becomes very difficult with numbers.

lrei 11y ago
Sure there is. My phone number is private information. And it can trivially be traced back to me (no possibility of anonymity). I don't necessarily want to share it with everyone I want to talk to. Or every company that makes a chat app. I'm pretty sure Snowden didn't start out by giving his phone number around... Plus every successful chat app before WhatsApp (from ICQ, XMPP apps, MS Messenger, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger) was fine without this requirement. Is the hypothesis that it is now impossible to have a successful chat app without it being tied to a phone number? We are not discussing a convenience "option" the user can skip but rather a requirement for these apps to work.
- pfg 11y ago
  WhatsApp is a mobile messaging app. It's a drop-in replacement for SMS. There would be absolutely no reason for anyone to use WhatsApp if they were just another chat app with their own contact discovery that's not based on phone numbers. Their market share would be miniscule. No one is forcing you to use a messaging app which is using your phone number as an identifier to contact anyone you don't want to see your phone number.
  - lrei 11y ago
    No one is forcing anyone to make claims about privacy either. 1) New social networks tend to replace old social networks: I'm not forced to use it but, for example, I can't go back to XMPP because others don't use it anymore. Meaning the option is not to communicate. 2) If everyone, including open-source developers (e.g. Signal), are doing this now and no-one is developing alternatives that run on modern platforms and are easy to use in non error-prone way w/o phone numbers, what exactly are the options even disregarding social network effects? 3) I doubt it's fully clear to many people what can be inferred from metadata related being trivial to prove who they spoke to and when. E.g. if it had been trivial for the NSA to know that one of its contractors was chatting with reporters it would've been game over for Snowden. In courts, circumstantial evidence like this can still be (and has been) used to imply guilt. Implying privacy under these circumstances seems unwise. 4) WhatsApp is mobile, fast, reliable and easy to use; Most of their competition at the time it launched and even now can't match that. This includes FB Messenger, Skype, Google, MS Messenger, etc I'm not sure it is proven that their success is entirely due to phone numbers. I've seen lots of people exchange phone numbers just for whatsapp.
    - pfg 11y ago
      > 1) New social networks tend to replace old social networks: I'm not forced to use it but, for example, I can't go back to XMPP because others don't use it anymore. Meaning the option is not to communicate. Right, but this is a mobile messaging app. There are still hundreds of desktop (or: not primarily mobile) messaging apps out there, many of which are very popular, and they're not going away any time soon. Phone numbers are how mobile phones are usually identified, and to ask a mobile messaging app to use something else for identification is, to put it bluntly, quite silly. > 2) If everyone, including open-source developers (e.g. Signal), are doing this now and no-one is developing alternatives that run on modern platforms and are easy to use in non error-prone way w/o phone numbers, what exactly are the options even disregarding social network effects? There's nothing in the protocol that forces anyone to use phone numbers as identifiers. The current users of the Signal protocol just happen to be mobile messaging apps, where it makes sense to use phone numbers as identifiers. > 3) I doubt it's fully clear to many people what can be inferred from metadata related being trivial to prove who they spoke to and when. E.g. if it had been trivial for the NSA to know that one of its contractors was chatting with reporters it would've been game over for Snowden. In courts, circumstantial evidence like this can still be (and has been) used to imply guilt. Implying privacy under these circumstances seems unwise. Now you're talking about metadata, and that's a different topic entirely. Merely using a pseudonym instead of your phone number as an identifier is going to do exactly nothing to prevent any of the things you mentioned. If you want to hide your metadata, you should be looking at something like vuvuzela[1]. No one claimed that WhatsApp is doing any of that. > 4) WhatsApp is mobile, fast, reliable and easy to use; Most of their competition at the time it launched and even now can't match that. This includes FB Messenger, Skype, Google, MS Messenger, etc I'm not sure it is proven that their success is entirely due to phone numbers. I've seen lots of people exchange phone numbers just for whatsapp. I'd argue that they wouldn't have been able to reach critical mass without phone number-based contact discovery. That they were the only ones who did it right at the time doesn't mean the two aren't related. [1]: https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela https://github.com/davidlazar/vuvuzela
- rtkwe 11y ago
  The trade-off here is to make it seamlessly fit into the place of SMS. The only thing the WhatsApp or Signal KNOWS that you have for all of your SMS contacts is the phone number. It's very possible to make a chat app that doesn't use this number but then contact discovery becomes a harder issue and people are less likely to use it if it requires them to recreate their whole contact list.