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WhatsApp Privacy Policy Update Allows User Data to Be Shared with Facebook
- reimertz 6y agoThis policy change got to clash with GDPR since they made it mandatory? I don’t use WhatsApp but someone who does should file a complain. Either way; we need to kill the idea that user growth is a replacement for a honest and legit business model. This is not just a founders problem - investors are equally compliant since they keep on throwing their money as long as they see that sweet exponential curve. Once they get tired of seeing their money being lit on fire; they give the founders one option; monetize what you have or shut down. Since users are now used to your service being free, the only thing you can do is to look at what you have; User data. At first, you just sell this info to your “trusted” partners because you want to be able to sleep at night, but as the revenue keeps on growing, your investors realize you have a money printing machine at your hands. At this point you you’ve lost your compass and forgot why you even founded the thing, being stuck at a big table discussing with investors and lawyers how to find loopholes in the new iteration of the GDPR laws, ending the meeting with deciding to funnel a big chunk of cash to lobby the law out of existence. At this point, everybody looses except from the stock owners. Or maybe you find it hard to sleep at night, because even thought you now have infinite amounts of cash, you lost a part of yourself that day when you threw your entire user base under the bus.
- Nextgrid 6y ago> This policy change got to clash with GDPR since they made it mandatory? Facebook (and plenty of other companies) breach the GDPR with non-compliant consent flows (similarly, you are forced to consent to tracking to visit Facebook or Instagram even as a guest without logging in) and refusing to fulfil data subject access requests and seem to get away with it. GDPR enforcement is a joke.
- Hamuko 6y agoHow does one convince their family to message them on Signal?
- 0-_-0 6y agoRespond with "write me on Signal" every time they write you. Worked for me.
- noja 6y agoThen Signal screwed it up by hassling them to enter a pin code the whole time. Back to WhatsApp they went.
- oAlbe 6y agoI'm sure there's a perfectly good reason behind that. But I must say, I already forgot two pins and there's now a pop up for the third one asking me to insert it every time I open the app, and I have absolutely no idea what this pin is either. Not entering it though doesn't seem to be preventing me from using the app though, so that's also weird. Meh, still not too much of a deal breaker to stop using Signal.
- noja 6y agoI have my pin in my password manager, but I can't tell Signal that. So it hassles me all the time. If I try and disable pin protection it gives me a scary warning about losing all my messages.
- fitblipper 6y agoYou can tell Signal that. Settings -> Privacy -> Disable "PIN reminders" under "Signal PIN".
- Macacity 6y agothey are asking you for the pin to remind you of it. When you enetered it correctly they are using a spaced repetition algorithm [0] for the next date they show that prompt. [0] https://support.signal.org/hc/de/articles/360007059792-Signal-PIN#pin_reminders https://support.signal.org/hc/de/articles/360007059792-Signa...
- Simplicitas 6y agoWhatsApp is good for chatting/phoning friends across the world. What are other alternatives?
- cleansy 6y agoWhen WhatsApp was bought by Facebook they specifically excluded that this would happen to get the OK from some EU commission. I do wonder how this will go down with them. EDIT: they already got fined 3 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whatsapp-m-a-facebook-eu-idUSKBN14917T https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whatsapp-m-a-facebook-eu-...
- absolutelyrad 6y agoThis explains why some people were forcing me to move to signal for the past 2-3 weeks. Glad I made the transition, you should too.
- noja 6y agoThis is exactly what Facebook agreed not to do when they purchased WhatsApp.
- jedimastert 6y agoClueless American here: other than state actors what's wrong with SMS?
- kashura 6y agoIt's inherently not private, and as an outdated format it can't quite support images (yes it can but big compression) and video (big compression) .
- random42_ 6y agoIn some countries SMS is not free and might get quite expensive. This is one of the reasons WhatsApp became so popular in these places.
- zvr 6y agoSMS are not free in the majority of countries. Group discussions are not easily conducted. Exchange of non-textual information (images, sound, video, etc.) requires something "more" (e.g. MMS).
- sgdpk 6y agoThis does not surprise me much. There have been more than two or three occasions in the past two years where Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were having connection issues simultaneously, which for me is an indication of how the services are getting more integrated.
- boardwaalk 6y agoYou're reading too far into that. It could just mean they were hosted in the same data center which was having issues.