The Whatsapp app could easily let you assign your own locally saved aliases to those phone numbers, when you're not sharing your address book. "Frankie" is a mo

The Whatsapp app could easily let you assign your own locally saved aliases to those phone numbers, when you're not sharing your address book. "Frankie" is a more usable moniker to me than "+12822745113". They could give us that ability in an afternoon. But they just won't. Because they want your address book. ALL OF IT. I wish there were some kind of "modern tech" technical review panel on board in, say, EU and US regulatory institutions. Not to impose or forbid certain changes, but to curate an evilness score. Publicly. And then if a monopolistic company consistently enshittifies things, when the time comes to apply a penalty (for some anti-competitive legal reason), the regulators will apply the reputation ("evilness") score as a multiplier (or divider, if you will) on the sum of the fine. Evilness can't be measured and expressed fully objectively. So citizens should be able to override a reputation score mutation (remember, they're public) through a referendum. An advantage of this approach would be that it could increase citizen awareness that things don't have to be this shitty. I'm occasionally amazed by how friends and colleagues put up with being pushed around by their OSes, their apps, their phones, sometimes to the point that cognitive dissonance makes them into apostate apologists.