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I use Signal and I’ve encouraged my friends and family to switch as well. But let’s be honest: WhatsApp is moving forward because they aren’t threatened by thi

I use Signal and I’ve encouraged my friends and family to switch as well. But let’s be honest: WhatsApp is moving forward because they aren’t threatened by this concern or losing some users to Signal. The average user doesn’t care about anything other than easily communicating with other people at this point, and news articles like this are part of the problem. Frankly, the sky-is-falling uproar about any and every privacy policy change from free services had burned people out and made them jaded. Tech media likes to portray every change as an egregious violation of personal privacy, yet most of this stuff is just mundane as targeting where the data never leaves the company. The media has become the boy who cried wolf with their attempts to present every type of data collection as bad. This article doesn’t even attempt to explain what the privacy policy changes are or what it might mean. It just implies that the reader should be angry. In 2021, everyone has heard the “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” line so many times that they’ve just accepted it and moved on with their lives. The media’s false equivalencies are simply accelerating it.

lokischild 6y ago
You seem to make many assumptions that are, AFAIK, false. The data is there and gets stored indefinitely. It is not only monetized for ADs, but for surveillance as well. Companies and state contact the company and buy that data about you.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Because your claims don’t match the proposed WhatsApp privacy policy changes this refers to. You can read a summary of the proposed changes here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/whatsapp-users-must-share-their-data-with-facebook-or-stop-using-the-app/%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202... Contrary to the public perception, Facebook isn’t in the business of selling data to other companies. The proposed changes don’t change that situation. A privacy policy isn’t going to stop the state from legally accessing data they’re legally entitled to. This is what I was trying to say with my comment above: The public perception of what these companies are doing has diverged from what they’re actually doing, and it’s making everyone so jaded that they’ve stopped paying attention to the details.
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lokischild 6y ago

You seem to make many assumptions that are, AFAIK, false. The data is there and gets stored indefinitely. It is not only monetized for ADs, but for surveillance as well. Companies and state contact the company and buy that data about you.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Do you have a source for that? Because your claims don’t match the proposed WhatsApp privacy policy changes this refers to. You can read a summary of the proposed changes here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/whatsapp-users-must-share-their-data-with-facebook-or-stop-using-the-app/%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202... Contrary to the public perception, Facebook isn’t in the business of selling data to other companies. The proposed changes don’t change that situation. A privacy policy isn’t going to stop the state from legally accessing data they’re legally entitled to. This is what I was trying to say with my comment above: The public perception of what these companies are doing has diverged from what they’re actually doing, and it’s making everyone so jaded that they’ve stopped paying attention to the details.
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