Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp.
What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I'm still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can't disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.
[Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
I like to think the problem is that "the nerds" have failed the rest of the people. People used to listen to us about computer stuff. Then computers became usable without us. Then smartphones arrived. We gladly were relieved of our obligations, but also of our influence.
It's too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be "sort of concerned" about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
I think it’s simpler. Boycotts don’t work at an individual level. I have been boycotting nestle for decades. Can’t say they’ve become less evil. That’s because the marginal effect is negligible for them and strongly negative for the individual (assuming you’re a fan of Kit Kat’s).
Network effects amplify the marginal impact on the individual, because they lead to a monopoly with no true competition. Sure, you can leave whatsapp for signal, but you can’t talk to that community group on WhatsApp from signal. From an individual’s point of view the market power is an absolute monopoly.
The only solution to these problems is organising to the level of a mass boycott, or regulatory intervention. The former is impossible because too many people don’t care about the company’s behaviour (not because they’re ignorant, they just don’t care) and the latter is slow and a very hard and unfun pursuit for campaigners.
Nothing we say to non nerds will be of sufficient magnitude on an individual level. It’d have to be collective action.
Personally I’m far more worried about Facebook undermining democracy right now. That’s sufficient reason to shut them down.
That would seriously break the network effect and eventually kill them off. Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc got popular because they where free and easy to use. However, the market is really fickle and network effects can kill stuff off really quickly.
WhatsApp is already DOA in my circle of friends, it might come back but the odds aren’t great.
The WhatsApp network effect is strongly tied to borders though. Almost no one uses it in New Zealand for example, but a lot of people use Facebook Messenger but it isn't completely dominant like WhatsApp is in some places. I wonder if it ties back to countries that have good value cell phone plans? Even the very cheapest plans here come with unlimited SMS and it's been that way since smartphones were first taking off.
I think you're understating the strength of weak connections. If I have even one friend who's not on Whatsapp that I want to stay in touch with then I'm going to download another app. If there's a group chat with this person then everyone in that group is downloading a second app. And then second degree and third degree connections get affected too.
Getting out of the EU would be a massive blow to any established social media company that depends on network effects. It doesn't matter as much for smaller companies that are still growing (eg. early Facebook still managed to grow by only offering services to college students).
Is it not reasonable to demand interoperability for one of the main methods of communication in the entire world?
Forcing a specific standard is problematic, but it would be reasonable to ask any communication service to provide a fully documented and public API with features and access equal to the features and access of the official application.
Random nerds make integrations to whatever application/protocol is in vogue, business still gets to have complete freedom in where their take their API and thus their product.
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I would even go as far as to say that every web-service should be machine-consumable in that fashion, but that's beyond the point.
They probably shouldn't mandate "how technology works". I certainly wouldn't vote for that.
However, I think that public services (paid for by taxes) should be open and accessible. That is, the government should mandate certain properties ("it should be open") and not certain implementations ("it should use this specific protocol / app").
Another commenter gave the example of Brazil schools sending parents important information via WhatsApp.
Now I'm not against the schools doing that if it's one of multiple options and if the parents have an actual choice. I think the government should mandate that at least one open choice be made available, without necessarily detailing said choice.
In my view this wouldn't stifle innovation. If you come up with some new communication app that's better than anything else, if it's open and many people pick it up, there's no reason for the schools not to use it instead of the older / inferior option. This would also allow schools to choose one among several open solutions according to their particular needs.
Because innovative != ethical!
Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.
Governments exist in large part to solve problems of the form "all individuals are incentivised to take actions which, when universally taken, are detrimental to the commons".
I am not sure it is a problem for most people though, if anything I believe most people would not like the alternative.
If the choice is between being tracked, which results in many things being free (as in beer) with otherwise almost no practical visible consequences for most people (different ads?), or having to pay for each and every service but no tracking, I think you would face a huge backlash if you forced the latter.
A solution could be to have free access if you accept tracking and pay otherwise, but I believe this is illegal under GDPR.
Who do you think that allocates frequency spectrum? Imagine if every mobile phone company wanted to lock its users by operating on a specific frequency.
Imagine if Hollywood or TV studios had any saying over Digital TV standards. Streaming would never exist and we would be used to a "pay-per-view" model forever, with mandatory and built-in DRM.
This is not about enforcing how technology works. It just ensuring that no monopoly can occur. Common standards don't stifle innovation, closed ones do.
We would have been much worse off if governments, or governmental bodies like the UN, allocated IP addresses rather than a private anarcho-like entity.
How does allocation of IP addresses related to pushing for interoperability of communication protocols?
If your analogy was something about governmental bodies was worse than private entities when pushing for a standard network standard, then you would have a point. But unless I am deeply wrong, TCP/IP, GSM, LTE, DVB, even FM radio and PAL were standards that only became dominant after governmental bodies sanctioned as standards and no one misses AppleTalk or Novell's IDP because of "government meddling".
Even still, the argument is not for killing private protocols or stopping private companies to innovate and develop new technologies. It's "just" that these innovations should be made on top of open standards instead of displacing them. Don't forget that Google Talk and even Facebook's messenger started on top of XMPP. They closed purely for business reasons, not technical ones. Had the FCC told them "do whatever you want with your network and your client, but anyone speaking XMPP should be able to communicate with your users", we wouldn't be in this mess.
I generally agree with this sentiment, but sometimes I think mandating cooperation between walled gardens is the only way to help consumers. Take healthcare for example: Epic, Cerner, Athena, etc all have NO incentive to build any interoperability into their products. It greatly benefits them to create walled gardens and wall-off hospitals and healthcare institutions from other institutions that use their competitors' software.
It took Congress to mandate open standards and to spell out that healthcare institutions must offer a public APIs to patients. We are only now starting to be able to download health records from hospitals as a result of this despite it being technically possible for decades. In fact there are still many patients that are required to request stacks of DVDs containing their health records, and this is their only option.
Obviously this is more a commentary on how shitty healthcare in the US can be, but also a good example IMO of how sometimes government intervention in technical standards requirements can greatly benefit consumers.
Market competition doesn't work for natural monopolies, and network effects mean messaging is one of those. Governments should regulate as necessary to ensure free markets for competition, which means aggressive antitrust enforcement and giving natural monopolies the choice between opening up enough to allow competition, or nationalisation.
Forcing interoperability means the apps need to actually compete with each other by being better - rather than just by being the biggest incumbent. Restrictions and requirements can boost innovation.
The EU cannot force anything. It would be enough for the company that provides WhatsApp to not have any business in the EU (today that's FB, it could be a spinoff tomorrow).
The only, weak, solution would be to force the EU ISPs, on an European level, to block FB. Blocking on itself will not be easy (technically speaking) and good luck to have a consensus on that among our countries.
I completely fail to understand why many US companies, operating on US grounds care about GDPR at all. I would not and, please, sue me. Even the ones that block access from EU are overreacting.
Rosa Parks was a militant activist and part of a large activist network that was consistently staging public acts in defiance of Jim Crow segregation. This is misleadingly left out of most folks’ intro to her most successful action.
My school system was always big on emphasizing that there were pre-cursors to Rosa Parks (like Claudette Colvin), but they didn't have the connections that she did to make it happen.
Another factor is that the black people that were mainly affected by the segregation were the primary funders of the bus system. Their boycott was incredibly significant to the bottom line.
When employees want to have more say over their working conditions, they organize. If users want to have more say over the product conditions, is there an opportunity to organize as wel?
Eh, it's not like "the nerds" can build a better product in terms of UX anyway, and definitely can't market it better.
Besides, who says "the nerds" are trustworthy anyway? They keep arguing among each other about which operating system or programming language is best, and why should we take their advice when software security vulnerabilities keep being discovered?
Not disagreeing with your point - it's become too easy to just randomly click "agree" on any TOS and trade away your privacy/security for convenience - but don't make it an "us vs them" type of thing. To me, this is purely corporate interest being prioritized ahead of public needs because most politicians either have no spine or answer to lobbyists more than the common person.
> Eh, it's not like "the nerds" can build a better product in terms of UX anyway, and definitely can't market it better.
Um, the original WhatsApp company was pretty much run by nerds, I thought, who made a product with UX so good they organically built a user base so large that FaceBook paid $16 billion for the company?
The service even cost money. A chat service for which you paid money to use. That was actually the argument why a lot of people used it, because "if you're paying for it, you know that they don't have shady business practices"
The only thing that surprises me is how long this change took. I expected them to do this when they removed the subscription.
"The nerds" tend to think logically and extrapolate without regard for reasonableness, precedent, or social norms. That makes us pretty bad at a lot of things (and we blow a lot of our credibility that way) but, it turns out, pretty good at predicting how corporations will abuse technology.
Kind of want to agree, but you're comparing the extremes on both sides. The truth is somewhere in-between, and consider that for mainstream products like WhatsApp or Windows or whatever, the general public never deal with actual salesmen, just word of mouth and marketing.
Maybe they didn't fail us...
Wikipedia: On February 21, 2018, Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Foundation
They failed us to sell WhatsApp to FB while the networks effects are (at least in Europe) in full effect. I simply can't abandon WhatsApp due to this now.
Convenience > Privacy, which is an interesting conundrum.
This makes privacy a feature more than a USP (unique selling proposition). I predict that some "privacy" focused products and search engines will need to pivot to something more than just "we don't steal your data."
I disagree with where and how this industry failed the rest of people. I can quote you numerous "nerds", such as the esteemed (/s) Eric Emerson Schmidt that told us on a public podium that it is unreasonable to have "an expectation of privacy "(a technical legal phrase, btw) when using the internet. So let's not blame this on the "smart phone" and usability.
In the late 80s and 90s, we had influential technologists that sold what became the Panopticon as a liberating force that would unleash creativity and usher in a new era of freedom. Most now work for one of the FANGs. The rest made a face saving effort via EFF.
> If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
Which VCs would fund them? VCs, even our gracious hosts YCombinator, are gate keepers of who & what gets funding.
Has YCombinator, with genuine educated and well informed geeks at the helm, ever supported a decentralized proposal?
Consumers can only choose from what is on the menu.
And "privacy conscious" competitors were not on the menu. Or maybe I did miss these. This is possible, so can you point out which VC funded "privacy conscious" startups failed against competing venture funded centralized systems?
To this day, non-geeks are not aware that it is possible for them to have their social apps while insuring their privacy.
Everybody uses Whatsapp. It is now so entrenched into society that it turned to be part of its popular culture. When people say "I'm part of a group of old car enthusiasts", they meant they are part of a Whatsapp group in which they discuss old cars.
Countless online services and apps were replaced by Whatsapp over the years, from the top of my head: all IMs, customer service apps, e-commerce (specially for SMBs), email and collaboration in general. I can't remember the last time I received a proposal or contract to be signed outside Whatsapp. My attorney asks me to send him all sorts of documentation, copies of IDs and legal evidence via Whatsapp because email is not as easy to use as the IM.
Well, it's lunch time. I got to order my Burguer King meal via their Whatsapp order taking bot. How convenient.
WhatsApp reigns supreme in India as well; we now have characters in TV shows and movies saying lines like, "I will WhatsApp you the details." WhatsApp might be Zuck's most significant purchase for global domination (at least for now).
Exactly. Facebook and WhatsApp likely have very little to worry about. Zuck knows that most users will keep using WhatsApp. However it does show that Facebook is not doing so well. The fact they need WhatsApp user data indicates problems in their "core" product.
I'm having a hard time understanding how WhatsApp could be convenient enough to replace most online services and apps. Do you send text messages with some magic keywords to order at Burger King, or is there a person on the other end reading it, or how does that work? How do you pay? How do you browse the menu? I don't understand.
In Central America whatsapp also _is_ basically the Internet along with facebook. There is a person on the other end taking your order and payments are always done in cash, although some advanced delivery drivers now carry a credit card swipe machine. Everything is done through whatsapp: bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications for children in schools, business introductions (dont know anyone who uses email for this over there). The Internet is whatsapp for these people, there is no such thing as "most online services and apps"
Thank you all for shining a light on this. I didn't know this was so bad. I'm simply annoyed that some social groups use Facebook to organize, our neighborhood group, the parenting class, so I just can't be a part of that and try to move individual people, like my immediate neighbors, onto other platforms. But "bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications", that's extreme.
At least for bills and govt services I wonder, who approves something like that?
My kids' school has 3 different learning management systems (not integrated, BTW) to which students need to submit their homework/assignments. Well, at least in theory.
In practice, parents take photos of homework and send them to teachers via Whatsapp completely ignoring a formal system maintained for that purpose. Poor teachers have to save the time to upload files from their phones/computers to the system later and keep things organized from school's internal perspective.
I thought about proposing to school's IT that they changed the process, allowing parents to email files to a certain inbox, which an app would collect the files later and push them into the system automatically. I ended up not going ahead with the proposal because I already knew their reaction to me: "Whatsapp makes the process simpler".
I've worked in technical support in Central America and there's something I noticed with some users. Like those younger than 25 y/o users or older than 65 y/o.
For them, their phone is their first computer and they never really used e-mail.
Some of them can't recall their e-mail addresses or less their e-mail passwords.
This happens even if Android is the most popular phone and requires a GMail account to be properly set up.
They just create a new GMail account when they get a new phone or somtimes just keep using the GMail account from the previous owner instead.
It works similar to talking to a robot via voice call. When you start the chat with the bot it will answer with a standard message saying things like "Hi, welcome to XXX" and present you with a fixed menu of options like "type 1 to create a new order" or "type 2 to inquire about an existing order" and so on. At certain points the chat may be transferred to a human.
Some places might also try to use a more clever bot where you write down what you want and the bot gives a canned response if it thinks it understands what you meant (often just looking at keywords). These can be frustrating to use, just like those voice call bots that use voice recognition.
> Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp...
In my circles WhatsApp usage was pervasive and I was one of those who really pushed for it.
Soon after it became obvious that Facebook was still Facebook even with WhatsApp on board we started pushing for Telegram (remember this was probably before Signal existed in its current form and long before Matrix became mainstream.)
It took two years or so calendar time, a few hours work I think - mostly advocacy - and included moving people from early teenage to late eighties, but was mostly painless and definitely worth it because of usability alone, even if the most important point was to keep our social graps out of the hands of future Cambridge Analyticas and whoever else Facebook wants to sell it to. (And I've hopefully learned not to underestimate grannies..!)
Today I'd probably pushed for Matrix, but as mentioned above that was not an option then.
Signal is also really nice despite one or a few big security problems (remotely exploit in the desktop client being the big one for me). Also it is US centric with all the problems that comes with it, it prioritizes security above everything and UX actually suffers from it and it isn¨t open, so as far as I can see we are locked in should they turn bad.
Whole Central and South America is like this actually. I have travelled to many countries. Often this is the only way to get a hospital appointment, and I prioritize my health over privacy from Facebook.
this single post would be grounds for nationalization/breakup/conversion to utility status for me. i wouldn't believe this if there weren't so many of you saying the same thing here. it's unthinkable for me to send any kind of confidential information via whatsapp.
> What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
It's zero-rating, which is a loophole to go around most net neutrality laws. Governments would have to patch that loophole or enforce a stricter interpretation of net neutrality laws, but then everybody would hate them because they'd be banning free stuff.
WhatApp is so prevalent in El Salvador that it would be very inconvenient not to use it. It's by far the preferred communciation service.
It's also the cheapest. Because its free with WiFi, and cost less than US$1.00 per day with a data plan. Compare that to phone calls that cost about US$ 0.15 per minute or SMS that cost US$ 0.06. It may not seem much, but when you factor the local minimum wage in urban areas: $1.87/hour or US$ 0.03/minute the difference becomes significant.
Perhaps the closest alternative here would be Telegram. It has niche users like government, NGOs, political organizations and group chats for people with similar interests (like Facebook groups are used in some countries).
I guess, WhatsApp has become like our tropicalized version of WeChat.
Its used to chat with friends, family, group chats (leaving a group chat unannounced is a big faux pas). Almost every class gets a WhatsApp group for coordinating coursework.
Most stores and restaurants, big and small, accept orders via Whatsapp and that way one can avoid the third party app delivery fees. It is also used to send bank transfer confirmations, and gps location pins to coordinate deliveries because our addressing system is not that good.
I even did most my last loan application via WhatsApp. And also discovered last year that the only way to contact one bank about an ACH transfer was via WhatsApp or by visiting a branch.
So basically, it's the most used and most affordable main way to reliably reach anyone or any company. From the largest bank, to the smallest mom and pop store. From my company's founder to the newest intern.
The only thing I still get by plain SMS is multi factor authentication tokens or the ocassional spam message.
In my country, WhatsApp, Facebook and Youtube are not free, but are a lot cheaper than general data packages. Which means we must organize even harder to get rid of these non-internet-neutrality believing companies.
When we went to Italy a few years ago it was a similar situation. You didn't have to use WhatsApp but it was far easier to get a taxi. Any driver who you didn't hail via WhatsApp would suggest you message then directly via WhatsApp for future rides.
> when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
Is it common for people to reach their limits? I understand it may happen by accident when you turn off wifi then forget to re-enable, but normally one takes care of their data quota or their plans and usage is such that they never or rarely use it completely, right?
I imagine one also has the option in both prepaid and postpaid plans to get more data for the rest of the month if it ever happens that they need more. It'd just be more expensive since it's out of package.
When I had limited plans I burned through it every month and had to live at the dialup level speeds the phone companies gave you once you used up all your LTE data. Usually it was because I had to do more driving that month than normal so I'd eat up more data streaming podcasts/music. Always kept an eye on how much data I had left, but used it all anyway.
At least now I have unlimited data via a prepaid plan so I can freely tether when cable internet goes down weekly.
The reason I originally signed-up to WhatsApp was because of spending more and more time in Brazil and realising how ingrained in society it is. Even though a lot of my friends and family there have iPhones, none use iMessage.
Reason is that it is also an interface for SMS, and SMS in Brazil is obscenely crazy expensive, some operators might charge 1 BRL per message or stuff like that (for context: 1 BRL is the price of a cup of coffee or of a bottle of water), using iMessage and having it to switch to SMS without you noticing can rack bills that are easily bigger than your wages.
It's not only expensive, SMS is dangerous too! There is huge amount of fraud around SMS and the “SIM swap” technique to clone credit cards and cause all kinds of havoc, some of them with the participation of corrupted employees from telecom companies.
You're right, I must have activated that toggle years ago and forgotten about it. Yes the SMS fallback could be painful if you're not paying attention.
> Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A
Pretty much correct in some countries.
My family (not in Brazil, but also not in the same country as me) all have Whatsapp. So I have it to keep in contact with them. They have it because everyone there has it. It's circular, it's the "network effect" but it's true. I can't entirely switch unless they switch too, and they can't switch unless their friends and co-workers switch. etc.
> [Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
There are several third-party tools that allow to convert the history from Android to iOS. I recently switched and was able to keep all of my history.
Mind naming the one you used? We'll have a spare iPhone soon when my wife upgrades and it might be time for me to go back to iOS after many years. I'm just a bit worried about some apps and things that might be harder to migrate like this.
> When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case.
This is a huge issue which I've had to come to grips with as well. I use both Telegram and WhatsApp (among other things) and I can't believe WhatsApp and Messenger, despite being supported by a FAANG such as FB, fall short on features - including the one you mentioned - whereas Telegram, a much smaller firm has been able to constantly provide useful features at a reasonable rate (not so fast and not so slow, so that users have time to adapt to changes).
Right now I cannot use Telegram that much because my network is all on WhatsApp and Messenger, but I do miss the good features such as being able to transfer all chats to other devices and use a desktop client without having to authorize it every single time (WhatsApp sucks at this...), literally send/receive any file format and being able to send messages to yourself - which acted as a private __cloud__. I think the fact that Telegram is moving towards ads could actually be a good signal that their main revenue is going to depend on ads, and not so much on selling users' data, but we shall see.
> I can't believe WhatsApp and Messenger, despite being supported by a FAANG such as FB, fall short on features - including the one you mentioned - whereas Telegram
Messenger has that feature too. Actually for both Messenger and Telegram it's much easier to provide it, because they don't encrypt the message, they just store them unencrypted. So they don't have anything special to do to give access to them from any device.
Sounds like a replacement for SMS is needed ASAP. We should not be relying on tech giants for something as critical as messaging. SMS is provided as part of a phone plan and does not rely on any FAANGs to operate. We need an end-to-end encrypted protocol for use over the cell network that is provided by default with all cell plans.
"When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case." - YAP!!!! TRUE!!!!
> When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case.
Same in India. It is indeed a critical social infrastructure here, if one is "texting" someone it is inherently assumed it would be through WhatsApp. And yes, schools, offices and even the Police use it too.
Actually I think the EU recently passed a law that bans not counting data use toward specific domains to allow competition. It makes much sense with your comment.
What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I'm still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can't disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.
[Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.