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This scientifically-looking paper could have been written by Captain Obvious himself. It is beyond obvious that contact discovery in any major messenger or soci

This scientifically-looking paper could have been written by Captain Obvious himself. It is beyond obvious that contact discovery in any major messenger or social network is facilitated by uploading all contacts from the user’s address book, with all the implied drawbacks. If users' behaviour has shown us anything, it's that they love it. And for all the dangers of their privacy loss, they happily trade it for the convenience of finding the people they know.

MattJ100 6y ago
"They love it" but they often aren't given the choice, nor are they fully aware of the consequences (I expect many would choose not to accept if the findings in this paper were presented to them in a clear understandable way). The average person barely knows what a server is. They install e.g. WhatsApp on their phone, they are likely to think that the app on their phone is doing the work of telling them who else is on WhatsApp. They are not likely to think that their contact list is being scraped and uploaded and stored on someone else's computer in a warehouse, and then profiled for advertising purposes and then exposed to strangers via an API. The average person may love the convenience, but the average person does not understand how it is implemented or the consequences of using such a service (as described in this paper).
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  In my experience, even after having made fully sure that they understand the risks involved, "the average person" will happily switch back to a walled garden IM platform the moment the next stupid feature comes in. Last time it was the (I think Whatsapp?) feature that allows, when replying to a message with an attached picture, to highlight a portion of the attached picture. That's it. There was no network effect at this point whasoever. This pseudo-feature was enough for an adult person to decide to switch back to Whatsapp and fuck my and everyone's privacy. THEN the network effect kicks in in favor of Whatsapp, because of course Whatsapp is a walled garden, so everyone is forced to switch to Whatsapp. I have seen this already happen several times network-wide and I will see it happen again. Non-walled garden IM networks are just set-up to lose.
christophilus 6y ago
It doesn’t show that we love it. I hate it. But it’s the cost of entry if you want to communicate with a group on any of those platforms (which I refuse to do outside of Signal). I didn’t love giving Signal my contacts list, but I did it.
kome 6y ago
> It is beyond obvious that contact discovery in any major messenger or social network is facilitated by uploading all contacts from the user’s address book, with all the implied drawbacks. Mass uploading contacts should be limited, like Telgram rightfully implemented. Signal should do the same. Also, for signal you have to give the list of your contacts. And you don't have with Telegram (and I didn't).
- duckfang 6y ago
  With Signal, it means your friends can rat you out by them sharing their address book.
  - egberts1 6y ago
    Yeah, associativity remains an issue via Signal but the encryted-at-rest message content can be timed out at your interval.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Actually, the general love for Signal on HN is puzzling to me. It's nothing more than yet another centralised silo not owned by the users. End-to-end encryption? I'd take federation over it any day.
  - egberts1 6y ago
    there is always Matrix app. Some may argue that Matrix still a centralized server by the virtue of seeding your group info somewhere. But this seeding can be done via paper-only thereby it is still a true decentralized messaging server.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      No, there is always xmpp. Matrix is just an app, and we need a federated protocol. I think that Matrix will never have an alternative server implementation made by a competing party, which makes it's main selling point void.
Ar-Curunir 6y ago
> This scientifically-looking paper could have been written by Captain Obvious himself Why didn’t you write it then? It’s easy to dismiss the work of others, not so easy to do the work yourself.
aljones 6y ago
Is there a "scientifically-looking" paper that shows that users love it?

MattJ100 6y ago

"They love it" but they often aren't given the choice, nor are they fully aware of the consequences (I expect many would choose not to accept if the findings in this paper were presented to them in a clear understandable way). The average person barely knows what a server is. They install e.g. WhatsApp on their phone, they are likely to think that the app on their phone is doing the work of telling them who else is on WhatsApp. They are not likely to think that their contact list is being scraped and uploaded and stored on someone else's computer in a warehouse, and then profiled for advertising purposes and then exposed to strangers via an API. The average person may love the convenience, but the average person does not understand how it is implemented or the consequences of using such a service (as described in this paper).

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
In my experience, even after having made fully sure that they understand the risks involved, "the average person" will happily switch back to a walled garden IM platform the moment the next stupid feature comes in. Last time it was the (I think Whatsapp?) feature that allows, when replying to a message with an attached picture, to highlight a portion of the attached picture. That's it. There was no network effect at this point whasoever. This pseudo-feature was enough for an adult person to decide to switch back to Whatsapp and fuck my and everyone's privacy. THEN the network effect kicks in in favor of Whatsapp, because of course Whatsapp is a walled garden, so everyone is forced to switch to Whatsapp. I have seen this already happen several times network-wide and I will see it happen again. Non-walled garden IM networks are just set-up to lose.

christophilus 6y ago

It doesn’t show that we love it. I hate it. But it’s the cost of entry if you want to communicate with a group on any of those platforms (which I refuse to do outside of Signal). I didn’t love giving Signal my contacts list, but I did it.

kome 6y ago

> It is beyond obvious that contact discovery in any major messenger or social network is facilitated by uploading all contacts from the user’s address book, with all the implied drawbacks. Mass uploading contacts should be limited, like Telgram rightfully implemented. Signal should do the same. Also, for signal you have to give the list of your contacts. And you don't have with Telegram (and I didn't).

duckfang 6y ago
With Signal, it means your friends can rat you out by them sharing their address book.
- egberts1 6y ago
  Yeah, associativity remains an issue via Signal but the encryted-at-rest message content can be timed out at your interval.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Actually, the general love for Signal on HN is puzzling to me. It's nothing more than yet another centralised silo not owned by the users. End-to-end encryption? I'd take federation over it any day.
- egberts1 6y ago
  there is always Matrix app. Some may argue that Matrix still a centralized server by the virtue of seeding your group info somewhere. But this seeding can be done via paper-only thereby it is still a true decentralized messaging server.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    No, there is always xmpp. Matrix is just an app, and we need a federated protocol. I think that Matrix will never have an alternative server implementation made by a competing party, which makes it's main selling point void.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago

> This scientifically-looking paper could have been written by Captain Obvious himself Why didn’t you write it then? It’s easy to dismiss the work of others, not so easy to do the work yourself.

aljones 6y ago

Is there a "scientifically-looking" paper that shows that users love it?