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A former colleague of mine who was a distinguished academic and successful tech executive grew up in East Germany. After the Berlin wall fell, he was able to en

• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  WhatsApp users were estimated to have a seven year useful life at the time of their sale. Facebook will want a profit on them, but if the estimate was accurate, there are only five years left until they are used up. Facebook may become increasingly desperate to transfer any remaining users into their primary product.
  • blowski 10y ago
    Estimated by whom?
    • jsprogrammer 10y ago
      Sorry, I must have edited that out when I put it to screen. The estimate appeared in Facebook's 2014 10-K filing.
• Gruselbauer 10y ago
  Absolutely true for older generations, but among those under, say, forty years of age, the 'I don't have anything to hide' fallacy is alive and well just as anywhere else. I'm German and it's been a huge ordeal to get my closest friends to migrate to Telegram at least. Signal was debated, but the lack of a good desktop client killed it. XMPP and IRC and all, not with these guys. Germany has some vocal proponents of privacy ideals, like the Chaos Computer Club, but we also have politicians who pull the very same crap as anywhere else.
  • glasz 10y ago
    telegram was sort of a bad choice: https://www.eff.org/node/82654 https://www.eff.org/node/82654 signal desktop (granted, stupid chrome plugin but official): signal.org/desktop
    • sasvari 10y ago
      compared to signal, telegram can be used by android users without gapps (the telegram client can be installed via f-droid). as much as I would like to use signal, I can't.
      • harry8 10y ago
        compared to signal, telegram stores all your messages on a server you don't control in plaintext. It's not the answer.
        • Gruselbauer 10y ago
          I know. But that's really where I, personally, make the decision to not care. Group chat with two dozen mates equals stupid banter, exchange of memes, lately some pictures of the young ones everyone seems to suddenly have, recaps of school day mischief. I don't say anything there I wouldn't say in a crowded room and neither does anyone else. For something as deviously criminal as 'you got pot man?', the private chat function is alright. Obviously the 'nothing to hide' fallacy is nonsense, but so is pretending every communication warrants the highest security parameters at our disposal. Signal is a nice app, have it installed among pretty much every other messenger. But none of my friends, colleagues and coworkers use it. I have one contact out of almost a thousand on there. The desktop client only runs in a browser, Telegram can be open on all kinds of devices and synch up (ncTelegram on a VPS where pretty much all my communication is relayed, in my case)... I know all the criticism, from the question of why they had to cook up their own crypto and nonfree server to the Russians behind it. It's still the best app I could sell to a lot of people who're not even close to tech literate.
• kafkaesq 10y ago
  Same affect achieved with social media. But instead of coercing us with barbed wire and machine gun nests... they watch us drug ourselves with dopamine-jerking apps that let us feel "connected" to people we aren't really all that connected to... and ah, that tingly feeling every time someone likes a photo we've shared, or a comment we made. Or "swipes right" on us. And the beauty is that these days, the guardians of State Security don't even have to do anything for all that metadata, all these photos, likes and heartfelt confessions of lust and ardour to be neatly digitized... they just have to sit back and (carefully) suck it all up. Except this time around their "cabinets" are about 850 million times bigger: http://apps.opendatacity.de/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html http://apps.opendatacity.de/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
• bduerst 10y ago
  Isn't the difference here that you have the freedom to leave or not use Whatsapp if you wanted to? Even the supposed FB shadow profiles would be hard pressed to reconstruct habit information.
  • harry8 10y ago
    It's a natural monopoly via network externality. Leave facebook, you miss information your friends and family post to facebook because that's enough. Leave whatsapp - you now can't message with encryption to a large number of your contacts. But yes, absolutely you should have signal. Everyone should. That's not the reality we're faced with. Whatsapp message to Dad is better than plaintext - that doesn't mean facebook can be as crooked as they like when they provide that.
    • bduerst 10y ago
      The same could be said about automobile manufacturers or any other industry with an oligopoly. That still doesn't make it East Block Germany.
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• type0 10y ago
  > (from the article) While WhatsApp has framed the changes as a way to give people a better service, not everyone is convinced. Need I remind everyone how another american company called IBM helped to collect information about people in Germany and how it ended, so it's not strange that germans are "not convinced". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
• TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  While I agree with spirit of your comment, in practice I have to check my beliefs. I don't think Europeans really care that much. As evidence I present the title of the article which conspicuously doesn't read "Facebook ordered to stop collecting data on Facebook users". If people really cared about mass surveillance would they actively participate in Facebook et al? I don't use Facebook, Twitter, etc, ostensibly because I'm not keen on mass surveillance. But if I'm truly honest with myself it's because I know I'll post things I'll later wish I hadn't.
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    > If people really cared about mass surveillance would they actively participate in Facebook et al? The problem is: These people weren't using Facebook. They were using WhatsApp which promised to not send their data to Facebook. I don't use either because I personally think it's silly to assume they won't sell your data to someone, but they did make the promise that they wouldn't.
    • mhurron 10y ago
      > They were using WhatsApp which promised to not send their data to Facebook. I've seen that mentioned before, but where does it say that? On WhatsApp's ToS it says they won't share WhatsApp data for others to see on Facebook, not that Facebook itself wouldn't use that data.
      • CaptSpify 10y ago
        https://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record-straight https://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record-straight is all I know about
      • harry8 10y ago
        So now facebook has your data, has a shadow profile of you (already had that from your friends) and adds your whatssapp metadata to. You have to trust all current and future facebook employees who ever have access to that data. You have to trust facebook can now and will always in the future be able to secure that data. Then you have to trust anyone they sell that data to in all these dimensions. Moreover if data exists it can be retrieved by government through legal or other means so you have to trust all current and future public servants in countries in which you may not even have or want citizenship rights. If you knowingly made that bargain and said, "Yes, I trust all these classes of people." Ok, fair enouhg. I imagine a number approaching 0% of facebook users, let alone whatsapp users actually thought through that bargain and knowingly agreed to it. But yeah, you're mom might not see who you talk to on whatsapp via her facebook account. So there's that.
• Jerry2 10y ago
  >He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by the collection of the most trivial details. Facebook has all of that and way more. They even know which sites you visit when you're not on Facebook (think Like buttons and logins and various JS libraries that your browser might request as you browse around the web).
  • kuschku 10y ago
    I’ve been collecting all chats’ contents I’m in, all webpages I browse, where I am, and when, etc in a database. Basically, I started with building bad, hacky clones of Google’s services for myself. But the resulting set of data is so huge and powerful. Not only can I find out just from my data where my friends were, and when, also with whom they talked, and when, with whom they’re interacting, etc. And that’s just for my own data, if I had that set of data about every human... I don’t even want to imagine what’d be possible.
• pbarnes_1 10y ago
  Think about this then think about what Twitter and Facebook really are... :)
• pjlegato 10y ago
  And yet Germany operates a massively well-funded federal security service that is conducting exactly that sort of mass surveillance today -- only now far more sophisticated than even Facebook, since they can surveil the entire Internet, in exactly the same manner as the NSA does. Other European countries are doing the same. It's at best naive and at worst hypocritical to pretend that Europeans care so much more about personal privacy than Americans do while that is going on.
  • wvh 10y ago
    What a "democratically elected" government does and what private people think is acceptable are not necessarily the same thing. There's often a surprisingly strong discrepancy between government action and the will of the people. Also, a lot of people feel that the government (in a Western/Northern European country) is mostly trying to protect its society even if some actions are misguided, while it's hard to make a statement about the benevolence of large corporations. Governments ought to be loyal to its citizens, while corporations only answer to their shareholders; their actions have no moral leeway nor are they beneficial to the majority of people. Facebook is not trying to protect society, it's trying to benefit from it. In most EU countries you are entitled by law to request to see and even demand removal of any data any company has on you at any time. This has been problematic in the past but will clash hard in the future with companies based outside the EU wanting to do business – or whatever name you want to call the activities of internet giants – with EU citizens.
    • pjlegato 10y ago
      The original thesis I was responding to was the theory that, due to historical experiences, Europeans are somehow much more concerned with personal privacy (in general) than others, which is is empirically false. State versus corporate surveillance was not the topic. Europeans may indeed be more mistrustful of corporations than others, I don't know; but Europeans are clearly not so concerned about personal privacy in general as compared to others (though they seem to like to believe that they are.) The BND, and its local equivalents in other European countries, are now openly conducting mass surveillance and citizen profiling on a scale that neither the Stasi nor Facebook could ever dream of achieving. Most of the citizens of Europe don't seem to care much at all about this. Therefore, the theory that Europeans are especially privacy-conscious as compared to others is false. Incidentally, with corporate surveillance, you (at least in theory) have the option to simply not use that corporation's products. You can't opt out of state surveillance.
• bagacrap 10y ago
  To my understanding, it's just Germany that's the outlier here, not all of Europe. I could be mistaken.