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I already knew this but it's still fucked. In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresse

by kace91 6y ago

I already knew this but it's still fucked. In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups. There is an expectation that the information you share by someone having your number is very limited - the person that has your number can text you, yes, but they can't know about you, and you can limit the small amount of info you let through like your profile picture or your online state using privacy controls. This expectation is completely removed when adding somebody's number to your contact list is enough for Facebook to do its magic and reveal the owner in your Facebook friends suggestions. I've had it happen dozens of times, I start texting a tinder match and suddenly her profile is there in my suggestions. It's common for it to misfire and I end up being suggested the personal account of the owner of a business I bought something for. They don't even need to text you, you add the number to your phone's contact list and it's there. Facebook needs to be broken apart, and we need a law that the data you share with an app can't be used for others period, even more so if they were separate businesses when you started using the service, and a change of policies is not enough - you might already be locked in.

raziel2p 6y ago
This has never happened to me, probably because I don't install the Facebook app and don't give Messenger Lite access to my contacts. If Facebook and Whatsapp were sharing phone numbers or metadata behind the scenes I would expect to see a lot of suggestions when I log in to the Facebook website, but I don't. Still agree with your opinion, though. Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts.
- csunbird 6y ago
  But your contacts do install the apps and Facebook can now match you.
- osobo 6y ago
  They don't as much share info as live off the same ecosystem in your phone. Regular users, who don't actively block their FB apps from accessing their phones in depth, will store Whatsapp contacts on their phones, which in turn are read by the FB and/or Messenger app. Since neither knows the context, it just assumes its a new contact and show you info accordingly.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. Is this a new limitation? On iOS I'm still able to message someone new using only their phone number. Though I'm blocking contact access so perhaps that's why.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  > Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. You can, if you're both part of a group chat together. Tap on their number and a pop up comes up allowing you to message said person. Also agree with the opinions expressed even with similar experience to yourself (no Facebook or messenger apps installed, WhatsApp contacts don't appear as suggestions on FB website).
  - chippytea 6y ago
    There are also third party apps like "Click to Chat" that let you start conversations with phone numbers. Once you sent 1 message you can just use whatsapp normally.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  >I don't install the Facebook app and don't give Messenger Lite access to my contacts Literally doesn't matter what you do, it's what other people do with your data. I can tell from this guy I interned for 15 years ago that at one point he uploaded his entire address book to Facebook including my name, email and phone number because he still shows up in facebook recommendations to me today on Facebook and IG. Never gave them access to my contacts either or even had him in my contacts but FB's shadow profile knows he knows who I am.
- juliand 6y ago
  > Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. The trick that i use is to type their number into the domain wa.me in the following format https://wa.me/xxxxxxxxxxx https://wa.me/xxxxxxxxxxx That allows you to open a chat to that specific number without adding them to your contact list.
  - tmp538394722 6y ago
    That’s a neat trick, but “Works for me” is not a solution for mass surveillance.
- kace91 6y ago
  I don't use their apps. They are almost certainly sharing data behind the scenes, they openly say this in op's link about how WhatsApp uses your data: > 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), (...) across the Facebook Company Products; There is a small chance that they've gotten all my data from the people at the other side of the conversation if they have the fb app installed I guess, which really isn't much better.
- dearjames 6y ago
  You can actually send a message without saving a contact. Using WhatsApp's click to chat: wa.me/263xxxxxxxxx?text=Hello Note: The phone number with country code and no preceding plus. Opening that link will launch WhatsApp (or WhatsApp web) to the user's number and the text "Hello" in the message field.
  - dijksterhuis 6y ago
    Doesnt seems to work for me. Get directed to a page saying I don't have WhatsApp installed (I do). Android v8, Firefox v68.6.
    - ffpip 6y ago
      That is because you are opening in browser. You have to set wa.me links to open in app. Open firefox settings, toggle 'open links in app'. (or) Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it. They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting. All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
      - dijksterhuis 6y ago
        Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    On Chrome Desktop Linux, it doesn't work despite me being logged into whatsapp web. Tries to do some xdg-open thing, but clearly that will never work considering whatsapp web has no registered protocol handlers... Looks like it is some half completed demo integration rather than production ready...
    - ffpip 6y ago
      Send the link to yourself in whatsapp and then click on it. Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it. They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting. All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  Facebook doesn't have my phone number but it still happens to me regularly, because I need the Facebook messenger app. Its really fucked.
saargrin 6y ago
here in israel its the same and we also got very high presence of Truecaller so basically if you expose your phone number anybody can find your real name and FB profile
- infinityplus1 6y ago
  To hide names from Truecaller, we have to create a truecaller account with the phone number and then change the name from your profile.
  - saargrin 6y ago
    i thought truecaller used an average of everybody else's contacts to figure what to display
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Drew_ 6y ago
Stop giving your Facebook apps access to your contacts. Newly added contacts were also showing up as suggestions in Facebook and Instagram until I turned this off. iOS and Android give you all the control you need to stop this from happening you just have to use it.
- anoncow 6y ago
  Stopped contact access, but my business Instagram handle keeps recommending me to follow my personal friends.
- astronautjones 6y ago
  it still gets your information if you're in someone else's contact list and they make the connection
  - antaviana 6y ago
    This. I recently installed Telegram without giving access to my contact list. Within seconds of installing, I received a telegram from a co-worker who jokingly said: "For privacy reasons, when you install Telegram, it sends a message to all of your contacts." It simply creates your virtual contact list from the contact lists of your contacts.
- tmp538394722 6y ago
  For most people it’s not reasonable to use WhatsApp without sharing your contact list. How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it? Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with? What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp. That’s not going to work for people.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    What's sorely needed is a way to stop the exfiltration of private data when it's not provided for a specific reason. I bet very few people who share their contacts with WhatsApp know they're getting uploaded to Facebook.
_fat_santa 6y ago
My suggestion would be to not connect any Facebook services. I have an old school FB.com account, an Instagram and a WhatsApp. All three of these accounts are not aware of one another. I'm sure FB probably still has ways of figuring this out but it gets you pretty far in mitigating the infomation flow between various FB products.
salex89 6y ago
Same in mine, but instead of WhatsApp it is Rakuten Viber, which is massively popular in Eastern Europe. Beats me why, I don't like it that much and don't have a slightest idea about what are they doing with our data. But it became an issue trying to communicate without it. I'm a WhatsApp user from the early days, and I'm still dreaming about a day WhatsApp will be "independent" again.
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  Hi, it wont be independent again.
tw25656993 6y ago
Why are you still using their products? From your comment you seem pretty passionate about this issue. From economics there is the concept of "revealed preference", your individual subjective preferences are revealed by the choices you make. In this case, we can observe that Facebook's subjectively bad qualities are enough to demand politicians Do Something, but not enough to suffer the inconveniences of using a different chat app, etc. The sad irony is that these points of concern are also potential advantages for competing platforms (e.g., Signal), and by regulating them away, Facebook/Whatsapp become further entrenched.
- ddulaney 6y ago
  > In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups. Presumably because they would like to be able to set up a date with their hairdresser and participate in parents groups. Maybe they could convince their friends to switch, but also maybe not. This is why there is a call for government intervention: a single person faces an enormous social cost for boycotting FB properties, but the government can coordinate either a change on Facebook’s end or a simultaneous changeover to other services.
  - tw25656993 6y ago
    > a single person faces an enormous social cost for boycotting FB properties I'm not clear on how to quantify "enormous". Many people don't use facebook and still manage to make appointments and lead fulfilling social lives. That said, it is clear that for many people the "social cost" is larger than the "facebook evil cost", even for people demanding government intervention. I guess for those people, the cost for demanding politicians Do Something is even less.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      I'm not clear on how to quantify "enormous". Many people don't use facebook and still manage to make appointments and lead fulfilling social lives. It depends a lot on your country or region. Your life is different from other people's lives. In my country, decoupling from Facebook is pretty easy. Google, less so, but doable. In some countries, decoupling from certain apps or ecosystems will leave you pretty much stranded.
baxtr 6y ago
I am trying to get rid of WhatsApp. My strategy for this is: Use iMessage with friends in the Apple world. Convince the Android folks to start using Signal. Has been quite successful so far.
- giovannibonetti 6y ago
  Telegram is a great alternative to WhatsApp. It's better in almost every aspect, as far as I can tell.
  - yoavm 6y ago
    It's worse in the most important aspect for messaging: it is not end-to-end encrypted by default. It wouldn't be crazy to assume some could get access to your messages. [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-russia-ban-lift-messaging-app-encryption-download-a9573181.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-rus...
  - msh 6y ago
    Except message security. Whatsapp is end2end encrypted by default. Telegram does not, they only provide transport security by default.
  - tonyztan 6y ago
    Signal is a better choice because it uses end-to-end encryption by default.
  - lxgr 6y ago
    Besides the obvious downside of not being meaningfully encrypted (even pointing out transport encryption as just "encryption" is borderline deceptive marketing these days, IMO), until recently it also had a very dubious business model. It now seems to be pivoting towards ad support, but isn't this exactly what people have been trying to get away from Facebook for?
- GoldenStake 6y ago
  I'm excited for the public launch of e2e encryption in the Android default Messages app. This would provide encrypted messages to a huge audience, everyone already on Android. Signal has stated that they will not support RCS (possibly that they can't due to technical limitations).
iamgopal 6y ago
Given that all features are known, how difficult is to build p2p WhatsApp clone ? Including all feature parity ?
- eganist 6y ago
  > Given that all features are known, how difficult is to build p2p WhatsApp clone ? Including all feature parity ? Signal. It even has one of WhatsApp's founders behind it now.
  - mattl 6y ago
    Signal doesn't have feature parity with WhatsApp. Signal groups are a mess.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  It already exists, but there's one feature that you can't copy from Whatsapp: its 2 billion users.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Also, free WhatsApp data is a perk of telcos in many countries (most of the Americas). A service that uses up expensive data just cannot compete with one that does not.
unixhero 6y ago
Ah, latin america. Ah, Brazil.
walkingolof 6y ago
Signal (signal.org) is a good replacement!

by kace91 6y ago

raziel2p 6y ago

This has never happened to me, probably because I don't install the Facebook app and don't give Messenger Lite access to my contacts. If Facebook and Whatsapp were sharing phone numbers or metadata behind the scenes I would expect to see a lot of suggestions when I log in to the Facebook website, but I don't. Still agree with your opinion, though. Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts.

csunbird 6y ago
But your contacts do install the apps and Facebook can now match you.
osobo 6y ago
They don't as much share info as live off the same ecosystem in your phone. Regular users, who don't actively block their FB apps from accessing their phones in depth, will store Whatsapp contacts on their phones, which in turn are read by the FB and/or Messenger app. Since neither knows the context, it just assumes its a new contact and show you info accordingly.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. Is this a new limitation? On iOS I'm still able to message someone new using only their phone number. Though I'm blocking contact access so perhaps that's why.
dijksterhuis 6y ago
> Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. You can, if you're both part of a group chat together. Tap on their number and a pop up comes up allowing you to message said person. Also agree with the opinions expressed even with similar experience to yourself (no Facebook or messenger apps installed, WhatsApp contacts don't appear as suggestions on FB website).
- chippytea 6y ago
  There are also third party apps like "Click to Chat" that let you start conversations with phone numbers. Once you sent 1 message you can just use whatsapp normally.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
>I don't install the Facebook app and don't give Messenger Lite access to my contacts Literally doesn't matter what you do, it's what other people do with your data. I can tell from this guy I interned for 15 years ago that at one point he uploaded his entire address book to Facebook including my name, email and phone number because he still shows up in facebook recommendations to me today on Facebook and IG. Never gave them access to my contacts either or even had him in my contacts but FB's shadow profile knows he knows who I am.
juliand 6y ago
> Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts. The trick that i use is to type their number into the domain wa.me in the following format https://wa.me/xxxxxxxxxxx https://wa.me/xxxxxxxxxxx That allows you to open a chat to that specific number without adding them to your contact list.
- tmp538394722 6y ago
  That’s a neat trick, but “Works for me” is not a solution for mass surveillance.
kace91 6y ago
I don't use their apps. They are almost certainly sharing data behind the scenes, they openly say this in op's link about how WhatsApp uses your data: > 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), (...) across the Facebook Company Products; There is a small chance that they've gotten all my data from the people at the other side of the conversation if they have the fb app installed I guess, which really isn't much better.
dearjames 6y ago
You can actually send a message without saving a contact. Using WhatsApp's click to chat: wa.me/263xxxxxxxxx?text=Hello Note: The phone number with country code and no preceding plus. Opening that link will launch WhatsApp (or WhatsApp web) to the user's number and the text "Hello" in the message field.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  Doesnt seems to work for me. Get directed to a page saying I don't have WhatsApp installed (I do). Android v8, Firefox v68.6.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    That is because you are opening in browser. You have to set wa.me links to open in app. Open firefox settings, toggle 'open links in app'. (or) Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it. They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting. All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
    - dijksterhuis 6y ago
      Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- londons_explore 6y ago
  On Chrome Desktop Linux, it doesn't work despite me being logged into whatsapp web. Tries to do some xdg-open thing, but clearly that will never work considering whatsapp web has no registered protocol handlers... Looks like it is some half completed demo integration rather than production ready...
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Send the link to yourself in whatsapp and then click on it. Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it. They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting. All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
toper-centage 6y ago
Facebook doesn't have my phone number but it still happens to me regularly, because I need the Facebook messenger app. Its really fucked.

saargrin 6y ago

here in israel its the same and we also got very high presence of Truecaller so basically if you expose your phone number anybody can find your real name and FB profile

infinityplus1 6y ago
To hide names from Truecaller, we have to create a truecaller account with the phone number and then change the name from your profile.
- saargrin 6y ago
  i thought truecaller used an average of everybody else's contacts to figure what to display

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Drew_ 6y ago

Stop giving your Facebook apps access to your contacts. Newly added contacts were also showing up as suggestions in Facebook and Instagram until I turned this off. iOS and Android give you all the control you need to stop this from happening you just have to use it.

anoncow 6y ago
Stopped contact access, but my business Instagram handle keeps recommending me to follow my personal friends.
astronautjones 6y ago
it still gets your information if you're in someone else's contact list and they make the connection
- antaviana 6y ago
  This. I recently installed Telegram without giving access to my contact list. Within seconds of installing, I received a telegram from a co-worker who jokingly said: "For privacy reasons, when you install Telegram, it sends a message to all of your contacts." It simply creates your virtual contact list from the contact lists of your contacts.
tmp538394722 6y ago
For most people it’s not reasonable to use WhatsApp without sharing your contact list. How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it? Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with? What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp. That’s not going to work for people.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  What's sorely needed is a way to stop the exfiltration of private data when it's not provided for a specific reason. I bet very few people who share their contacts with WhatsApp know they're getting uploaded to Facebook.

_fat_santa 6y ago

My suggestion would be to not connect any Facebook services. I have an old school FB.com account, an Instagram and a WhatsApp. All three of these accounts are not aware of one another. I'm sure FB probably still has ways of figuring this out but it gets you pretty far in mitigating the infomation flow between various FB products.

salex89 6y ago

Same in mine, but instead of WhatsApp it is Rakuten Viber, which is massively popular in Eastern Europe. Beats me why, I don't like it that much and don't have a slightest idea about what are they doing with our data. But it became an issue trying to communicate without it. I'm a WhatsApp user from the early days, and I'm still dreaming about a day WhatsApp will be "independent" again.

vijaybritto 6y ago
Hi, it wont be independent again.

tw25656993 6y ago

Why are you still using their products? From your comment you seem pretty passionate about this issue. From economics there is the concept of "revealed preference", your individual subjective preferences are revealed by the choices you make. In this case, we can observe that Facebook's subjectively bad qualities are enough to demand politicians Do Something, but not enough to suffer the inconveniences of using a different chat app, etc. The sad irony is that these points of concern are also potential advantages for competing platforms (e.g., Signal), and by regulating them away, Facebook/Whatsapp become further entrenched.

ddulaney 6y ago
> In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups. Presumably because they would like to be able to set up a date with their hairdresser and participate in parents groups. Maybe they could convince their friends to switch, but also maybe not. This is why there is a call for government intervention: a single person faces an enormous social cost for boycotting FB properties, but the government can coordinate either a change on Facebook’s end or a simultaneous changeover to other services.
- tw25656993 6y ago
  > a single person faces an enormous social cost for boycotting FB properties I'm not clear on how to quantify "enormous". Many people don't use facebook and still manage to make appointments and lead fulfilling social lives. That said, it is clear that for many people the "social cost" is larger than the "facebook evil cost", even for people demanding government intervention. I guess for those people, the cost for demanding politicians Do Something is even less.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I'm not clear on how to quantify "enormous". Many people don't use facebook and still manage to make appointments and lead fulfilling social lives. It depends a lot on your country or region. Your life is different from other people's lives. In my country, decoupling from Facebook is pretty easy. Google, less so, but doable. In some countries, decoupling from certain apps or ecosystems will leave you pretty much stranded.

baxtr 6y ago

I am trying to get rid of WhatsApp. My strategy for this is: Use iMessage with friends in the Apple world. Convince the Android folks to start using Signal. Has been quite successful so far.

giovannibonetti 6y ago
Telegram is a great alternative to WhatsApp. It's better in almost every aspect, as far as I can tell.
- yoavm 6y ago
  It's worse in the most important aspect for messaging: it is not end-to-end encrypted by default. It wouldn't be crazy to assume some could get access to your messages. [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-russia-ban-lift-messaging-app-encryption-download-a9573181.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-rus...
- msh 6y ago
  Except message security. Whatsapp is end2end encrypted by default. Telegram does not, they only provide transport security by default.
- tonyztan 6y ago
  Signal is a better choice because it uses end-to-end encryption by default.
- lxgr 6y ago
  Besides the obvious downside of not being meaningfully encrypted (even pointing out transport encryption as just "encryption" is borderline deceptive marketing these days, IMO), until recently it also had a very dubious business model. It now seems to be pivoting towards ad support, but isn't this exactly what people have been trying to get away from Facebook for?
GoldenStake 6y ago
I'm excited for the public launch of e2e encryption in the Android default Messages app. This would provide encrypted messages to a huge audience, everyone already on Android. Signal has stated that they will not support RCS (possibly that they can't due to technical limitations).

iamgopal 6y ago

Given that all features are known, how difficult is to build p2p WhatsApp clone ? Including all feature parity ?

eganist 6y ago
> Given that all features are known, how difficult is to build p2p WhatsApp clone ? Including all feature parity ? Signal. It even has one of WhatsApp's founders behind it now.
- mattl 6y ago
  Signal doesn't have feature parity with WhatsApp. Signal groups are a mess.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
It already exists, but there's one feature that you can't copy from Whatsapp: its 2 billion users.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Also, free WhatsApp data is a perk of telcos in many countries (most of the Americas). A service that uses up expensive data just cannot compete with one that does not.

unixhero 6y ago

Ah, latin america. Ah, Brazil.

walkingolof 6y ago

Signal (signal.org) is a good replacement!