3 ms·

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 sha

• 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
      • lrei 11y ago
        > . 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. I disagree it's silly. > There's nothing in the protocol that forces anyone to use phone numbers as identifier I'm aware. But there's also no alternative to phone number now. So my point stands until this changes. > 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 Yes it does if the pseudonym can not be connected to me. That requires other security/privacy measures but phone numbers prevent that. > No one claimed that WhatsApp is doing any of that. If you say something is great for privacy but don't include the asterisks it's misleading. > I'd argue that they wouldn't have been able to reach critical mass without phone number-based contact discovery. No one has proven it either way. I can't be certain they would've been successful, you can't they wouldn't. But I do submit as evidence of my hypothesis that several social networks were successful on mobile without it (e.g. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook).
• 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.