6 ms·

Privacy is more popular than ever

40 points by kawera 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
aphextron 9y ago
I've been wondering lately how feasible it would be to build an e2e encrypted social networking service. Just give people a completely secure place to store their photos, build a network of friends, message people, and promote social events without having their data mined for advertisements and government subpoenas.
- SirensOfTitan 9y ago
  I think some significant breakthroughs need to happen re: homomorphic encryption for this to be feasible at all. Search, recommendations, and integration all would be significantly degraded otherwise compared to something like Facebook.
- dano 9y ago
  I think Apple is trying to move towards local-data, that is, taking traditional cloud based services and putting them into the device. The idea being that your data doesn't have to be aggregated centrally in order to apply machine learning and develop connections. Your data is yours to control. I don't know how effective this move will be.
idlewords 9y ago
It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the message metadata and linking your WhatsApp use to your Facebook account. But what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public, but not have their words live in perpetuity. What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.
- Spivak 9y ago
  WhatsApp is really the first E2E messaging app that you can actually get your friends to use because it's blazing fast, the UI is friendly, and the E2E is 99% transparent. You don't actually have to verify the signatures in WhatsApp assuming that at some point you believe you're talking to the right person which can be gleaned a million different ways. Then you can/should be suspicious if it changes.
  - idlewords 9y ago
    Yeah, WhatsApp is great. Except that Facebook mines the hell out of message metadata.
  - petre 9y ago
    It needs access to your contacts list, something I am not willing to grant it, given that it's owned by Facebook. Otherwise it doesn't work. Singal and Wire work regardless.
pmontra 9y ago
I think that the core concept of the article is somewhat misplaced. What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. Then came the better UI, emoticons, group chats and network effects. Only few people understand the privacy differences with SMS. Proof: how many security codes did you verify compared to the number of your active contacts? About Twitter, its growth is limited not because of privacy concerns but because everybody understands that it's a public chat. Privacy is not even in the equation, nobody expects it so nobody is concerned about it. It's really down to the I don't have anything to say in public thing. People have a lot to say to friends but little to strangers. Not everybody is a blogger or has to send press releases, and even them, maybe only in their working persona. To recap. Not only it's comparing apples to oranges (the post acknowledge that) but privacy is not a factor in both IMs and Twitter, unless you think that parents' advice "do not talk to strangers" is about privacy.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  > What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. I disagree. I'm pretty sure having to pay extra for SMS and limits on the number of messages were things of the distant past before WhatsApp started.
  - 1_player 9y ago
    Not sure where you're located but here in the UK (or Italy) SMS are not free, unless you have a mobile plan and/or you're texting someone on the same network. Good luck if you're texting someone in another country. That's why (almost) everybody in Europe uses WhatsApp. I use SMS _only_ to receive 2FA codes.
    - sametmax 9y ago
      Not in France. SMS are free and unlimited on all providers, across all providers.
      - 9y ago
euske 9y ago
Offtopic, but I wonder what happened to their "no Adblock plz" policy. I can read the site without a problem now.
- JonRB 9y ago
  It may potentially have proven to be completely ineffective at getting people to turn off their adblockers.
- Markoff 9y ago
  maybe people with adblockers rather stopped visiting their site than switching off adblocker? at least that was my case so you say i can stop boycotting them?
robobro 9y ago
"Privacy isn't dead," with no mention of the highly relevant Wikileaks "Vault 7" campaign... hahaha.
CM30 9y ago
Hmm, not sure these examples make much sense here. Yes Twitter is losing popularity and WhatsApp is gaining it, but remember that: 1. For most people, WhatsApp's key draw isn't privacy or encryption, it's a convenient way of messaging people for free. It's replaced standard text messaging for many of them, and IM clients for others. Similarly, Twitter may be mostly public, but that's not really why people might not be using it so much any more. Instead, I'd blame its continually worsening reputation (associated with mobs, doxing and people getting attacked for 'wrongthink'), general decline in quality due to recent political events taking over everything and poor management that doesn't understand what its users really want from the service. The fact these services can be used to represent 'privacy' or a lack of it is a nice coincidence. 2. The two services aren't really direct competitors. People don't use WhatsApp to replace Twitter or vice versa. It could be more useful to look up what those WhatsApp users were using before switching to the app, and figuring out where Twitter users go after they leave.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
  They really weren't comparing apples to oranges?
pgeorgep 9y ago
Can't really compare Twitter to WhatsApp since they are in entirely different categories of apps. Twitter is a social network, and WhatsApp is a messenger. None the less, privacy deserves to be more popular than ever.

40 points by kawera 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

I've been wondering lately how feasible it would be to build an e2e encrypted social networking service. Just give people a completely secure place to store their photos, build a network of friends, message people, and promote social events without having their data mined for advertisements and government subpoenas.

SirensOfTitan 9y ago
I think some significant breakthroughs need to happen re: homomorphic encryption for this to be feasible at all. Search, recommendations, and integration all would be significantly degraded otherwise compared to something like Facebook.
dano 9y ago
I think Apple is trying to move towards local-data, that is, taking traditional cloud based services and putting them into the device. The idea being that your data doesn't have to be aggregated centrally in order to apply machine learning and develop connections. Your data is yours to control. I don't know how effective this move will be.

idlewords 9y ago

It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the message metadata and linking your WhatsApp use to your Facebook account. But what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public, but not have their words live in perpetuity. What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.

Spivak 9y ago
WhatsApp is really the first E2E messaging app that you can actually get your friends to use because it's blazing fast, the UI is friendly, and the E2E is 99% transparent. You don't actually have to verify the signatures in WhatsApp assuming that at some point you believe you're talking to the right person which can be gleaned a million different ways. Then you can/should be suspicious if it changes.
- idlewords 9y ago
  Yeah, WhatsApp is great. Except that Facebook mines the hell out of message metadata.
- petre 9y ago
  It needs access to your contacts list, something I am not willing to grant it, given that it's owned by Facebook. Otherwise it doesn't work. Singal and Wire work regardless.

pmontra 9y ago

I think that the core concept of the article is somewhat misplaced. What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. Then came the better UI, emoticons, group chats and network effects. Only few people understand the privacy differences with SMS. Proof: how many security codes did you verify compared to the number of your active contacts? About Twitter, its growth is limited not because of privacy concerns but because everybody understands that it's a public chat. Privacy is not even in the equation, nobody expects it so nobody is concerned about it. It's really down to the I don't have anything to say in public thing. People have a lot to say to friends but little to strangers. Not everybody is a blogger or has to send press releases, and even them, maybe only in their working persona. To recap. Not only it's comparing apples to oranges (the post acknowledge that) but privacy is not a factor in both IMs and Twitter, unless you think that parents' advice "do not talk to strangers" is about privacy.

pessimizer 9y ago
> What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost and without limits. I disagree. I'm pretty sure having to pay extra for SMS and limits on the number of messages were things of the distant past before WhatsApp started.
- 1_player 9y ago
  Not sure where you're located but here in the UK (or Italy) SMS are not free, unless you have a mobile plan and/or you're texting someone on the same network. Good luck if you're texting someone in another country. That's why (almost) everybody in Europe uses WhatsApp. I use SMS _only_ to receive 2FA codes.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Not in France. SMS are free and unlimited on all providers, across all providers.
    - 9y ago

euske 9y ago

Offtopic, but I wonder what happened to their "no Adblock plz" policy. I can read the site without a problem now.

JonRB 9y ago
It may potentially have proven to be completely ineffective at getting people to turn off their adblockers.
Markoff 9y ago
maybe people with adblockers rather stopped visiting their site than switching off adblocker? at least that was my case so you say i can stop boycotting them?

robobro 9y ago

"Privacy isn't dead," with no mention of the highly relevant Wikileaks "Vault 7" campaign... hahaha.

CM30 9y ago

Hmm, not sure these examples make much sense here. Yes Twitter is losing popularity and WhatsApp is gaining it, but remember that: 1. For most people, WhatsApp's key draw isn't privacy or encryption, it's a convenient way of messaging people for free. It's replaced standard text messaging for many of them, and IM clients for others. Similarly, Twitter may be mostly public, but that's not really why people might not be using it so much any more. Instead, I'd blame its continually worsening reputation (associated with mobs, doxing and people getting attacked for 'wrongthink'), general decline in quality due to recent political events taking over everything and poor management that doesn't understand what its users really want from the service. The fact these services can be used to represent 'privacy' or a lack of it is a nice coincidence. 2. The two services aren't really direct competitors. People don't use WhatsApp to replace Twitter or vice versa. It could be more useful to look up what those WhatsApp users were using before switching to the app, and figuring out where Twitter users go after they leave.

bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
They really weren't comparing apples to oranges?

pgeorgep 9y ago

Can't really compare Twitter to WhatsApp since they are in entirely different categories of apps. Twitter is a social network, and WhatsApp is a messenger. None the less, privacy deserves to be more popular than ever.