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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 h

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.
- hadrien01 6y ago
  Contact sharing between Facebook and WhatsApp should be opt-in with GDPR, but enforcement has been almost non-existent these last few years.
AlexandrB 6y ago
I've been using WhatsApp without giving it contact access for a few years and it's possible but annoying. Since WhatsApp still shows you recent chats you don't have to type phone numbers each time, you just select from the list of recent chats. You also get to see people's WhatsApp profile photo so it's generally possible to know who you're talking to even though their username is their phone number. This works ok for me with around a dozen frequent WhatsApp contacts but I could see it breaking down if you have more than 20 frequent contacts. > 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. Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. It's pretty intentional. Why would I want to use WhatsApp with everyone? That concept seems aligned with Facebook's goals, not mine.
- tmp538394722 6y ago
  > Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. Because WhatsApp (and other messengers) offer a far superior messaging experience to SMS: higher fidelity media, on time delivery, delivery status, e2e, and many more. Better experience means that people actually use it. As you say, for “extra security”. But not everyone arrived at the decision of “how much security” they need at the same moment in time. People come to and leave the WA platform, and it’s desirable for me to know where people are at now so I can use e2e in new places as opposed to only with the subset of my social graph that I manually copied and pasted in which had installed WA before me. I don’t deny that you like your setup, but it sounds pretty painful and pretty unlikely to appeal to a broad swathe of people, which is essential when trying to combat mass surveillance. (is mass surveillance why you jump through these hoops?)
  - ArchOversight 6y ago
    On my prepaid plan in Europe I get a lot more data for the money than I get SMS messages. Text messages cost me 10 cents per message. WhatsApp by comparison was practically free. So it is not even about superior messaging experience, it also comes down to cost.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > possible but annoying That's the thing: people (non-tech, non-privacy aware) are always trading privacy for convenience.
stinos 6y ago
How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it? You ask them via other means? It might be slightly inconvenient, yes, but you almost make it sound like even SMS is an impossible task; SMS is not even that old and none of the millions who used it before there were even apps to do so had much of the problems you mention. Also because not everyone has a usecase requiring to know who has what app. I run WhatsApp on an Android instance with an account solely for that, so no contacts etc, and literally all my contacts/groups in WhatsApp are people who at one point told 'let's do this via whatsapp'. Then again, I don't need to message people I don't know with it so I don't have any problems. Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with? No, just once, or else they send me a message and we're talking. tldr; ok I'm not 'most people' in this regard, but still I think you're making things look way harder then they actually are
- Frondo 6y ago
  SMS is 25+ years old -- I only know I had it on my first phone -- and the absolute ubiquity of replacements (of which WhatsApp is just one) suggests those problems are real ones for a lot of people. If you're not "most people" in this conversation, that's a pretty big caveat when talking about how the problems are not actually so, really.

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.

hadrien01 6y ago
Contact sharing between Facebook and WhatsApp should be opt-in with GDPR, but enforcement has been almost non-existent these last few years.

AlexandrB 6y ago

I've been using WhatsApp without giving it contact access for a few years and it's possible but annoying. Since WhatsApp still shows you recent chats you don't have to type phone numbers each time, you just select from the list of recent chats. You also get to see people's WhatsApp profile photo so it's generally possible to know who you're talking to even though their username is their phone number. This works ok for me with around a dozen frequent WhatsApp contacts but I could see it breaking down if you have more than 20 frequent contacts. > 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. Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. It's pretty intentional. Why would I want to use WhatsApp with everyone? That concept seems aligned with Facebook's goals, not mine.

tmp538394722 6y ago
> Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. Because WhatsApp (and other messengers) offer a far superior messaging experience to SMS: higher fidelity media, on time delivery, delivery status, e2e, and many more. Better experience means that people actually use it. As you say, for “extra security”. But not everyone arrived at the decision of “how much security” they need at the same moment in time. People come to and leave the WA platform, and it’s desirable for me to know where people are at now so I can use e2e in new places as opposed to only with the subset of my social graph that I manually copied and pasted in which had installed WA before me. I don’t deny that you like your setup, but it sounds pretty painful and pretty unlikely to appeal to a broad swathe of people, which is essential when trying to combat mass surveillance. (is mass surveillance why you jump through these hoops?)
- ArchOversight 6y ago
  On my prepaid plan in Europe I get a lot more data for the money than I get SMS messages. Text messages cost me 10 cents per message. WhatsApp by comparison was practically free. So it is not even about superior messaging experience, it also comes down to cost.
FalconSensei 6y ago
> possible but annoying That's the thing: people (non-tech, non-privacy aware) are always trading privacy for convenience.

stinos 6y ago

How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it? You ask them via other means? It might be slightly inconvenient, yes, but you almost make it sound like even SMS is an impossible task; SMS is not even that old and none of the millions who used it before there were even apps to do so had much of the problems you mention. Also because not everyone has a usecase requiring to know who has what app. I run WhatsApp on an Android instance with an account solely for that, so no contacts etc, and literally all my contacts/groups in WhatsApp are people who at one point told 'let's do this via whatsapp'. Then again, I don't need to message people I don't know with it so I don't have any problems. Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with? No, just once, or else they send me a message and we're talking. tldr; ok I'm not 'most people' in this regard, but still I think you're making things look way harder then they actually are

Frondo 6y ago
SMS is 25+ years old -- I only know I had it on my first phone -- and the absolute ubiquity of replacements (of which WhatsApp is just one) suggests those problems are real ones for a lot of people. If you're not "most people" in this conversation, that's a pretty big caveat when talking about how the problems are not actually so, really.