WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.
The requirement is being delivered through an in-app alert directing users to agree to sweeping changes in the WhatsApp terms of service. Those who don’t accept the revamped privacy policy by February 8 will no longer be able to use the app.
I pretty much have no choice but to accept. Everybody uses WhatsApp – it’s so entrenched in dutch society the app itself has become a verb. Opting out means making it a lot more difficult to talk with my friends, which is already difficult enough considering I live in Sweden now.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: crucial communication protocols – of which WhatsApp is one in many countries – must be open and free to be implemented by anyone. It’s pure insanity to me that important lines of communication are left to faceless corporations on the other side of the world.
Thom Holwerda,
I understand this predicament all too well. Some of us have been extremely vocal against this mass consolidation of power at the hands of oligopolies and I keep hammering on about the importance of federated networks. Yet most people just don’t listen, don’t care, and don’t act. It’s this apathy by the masses that gives the huge corporations power over the rest of us. You really should not accept it out of principal if your principals are to mean anything, but facebook fully expects you and everyone else to fall in line anyways. And here’s the thing is they are almost certainly right.
Yeah, I use it a lot but I’ll be deleting it before this comes into effect. Will just have to find different ways of communicating, or just accept that the communications weren’t that important in the first place.
Yep. Marketing works.
They paid something like $19 billion for WhatsApp. At that time the app was priced $1/user/year. That math said it would take many decades to pay back that acquisition cost.
There were three other alternatives:
1) Build a business product
2) Just use this as an opportunity to block competitors
3) Mine user data for ads
I am okay with (1), but they already had another business offering. (2) is I think still there, and I would be okay with (3) if Whatsapp was like that from day 1.
But this is more like bait and switch. They built the network based on trust and end-to-end encryption. Now once the user base is very large, they want to fundamentally change how the app works.
I think Signal will gain a lot of users after this.
I read that maths of the Facebook acquisition of Whatsapp was less about revenue than about the cost of building an alternative attraction while Whatsapp was developing its own user base and ecosystem which might put Facebook out of business. That is why they paid over the odds for something which doesn’t otherwise make sense on paper.
Also don’t forget the security services throwing bungs around and whispering in politicians ears to give Facebook an easy ride because better their data than a competitors in an external jurisdiction.
HollyB,
That’s a good point. The price of technology is pretty modest in comparison to the difficulty of competing for and building marketshare. This is why google video failed. They could build the technology but in the end they had to buy youtube for it’s market share.
sukru,
Nothing’s too controversial about #1. I’m surprised you are ok with #2 though since the blocking of competition is usually one of the worst outcomes for consumers. #3 is just the reality of business and it’s kind of irrelevant if you are ok with it or not.
If you allow yourself to become tethered to a specific service provider, then you’ve put yourself in this position of giving them control over you. Google maps broke an application I wrote a long time ago, which was annoying, but really not surprising. And that’s the thing, while I do sympathize with user’s frustrations when services change, that’s just the way it is. Anyone who is adamant about not letting service providers push them around needs to insist on portable & open standards where they have the option of migrating to a competitor or self hosting Nothing else can provide similar long term assurances.
Alfman,
You are right. It is the reality of business, but that does not mean I need to like it.
Buy an expensive TV, instead of discount ad supported one? Now we will serve ads on the main screen. The only option we give you is not using the smart features you paid for.
Upgrade to Windows 10? Great, we will now install Candy Crush without telling you. If you happen to uninstall my mistake? No worries, we will keep installing it for you.
This started with the Cable TV going “no longer ad free”, and all the services seem to be migrating that way.
Here is an actual survey to gauge potential ads response on Netflix: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5BDR3BL
While the network effects of Big Tech definitely create some quasi monopolies, I think people overestimate how hard it is to switch at times. Somethings do require effort by the people.
I just downloaded Signal a few days ago. I’ve switched over most of my groups from Whatsapp and most of my people contacts.
The fact that accounts are phone number based also makes the switch easy. I’ve donated to hopefully keep it private and ad-free.
I still have Whatsapp there as there’s a few people still on it, but honestly this switch was really easy. It was literally a matter of just suggesting it in the groups and people, and by in large people switched over.
I’ve struggled to remove Facebook. I’ve removed the app on my phone, but I still keep the account just because of the network effects of my current connections and I have connections with people there I don’t talk to all that often. So, I do understand how hard it can be to switch. But let’s not dis-empower ourselves here. Switching to signal is just too easy.
Yamin,
*I* know that, but it the network effect is mostly about what other people do and think. I don’t have much control over them.
I never used whatsapp in the first place, so no loss for me. But an indian contractor had insisted on whatsapp a couple of years ago… I use a landline for all my business calls, and phone calls have never been an issue for any other US company I’ve worked with, but I didn’t want to cause problems so I installed the whatsapp client. However it turns out it requires a mobile registration and will not activate on landlines. Well, they had no business having my personal number and I wasn’t about to start making exceptions for these guys. I told them flat out that whatsapp is incompatible with US business lines and they would have to accommodate a less restrictive service. And ultimately they did. It worked out for me because I was in a position of power.
However I recently faced a situation where I was not in a dominant position and had to give up control over my hardware. I choose to use a LineageOS phone with google services removed. Good riddance, right? But not long ago I was forced to get a stock android phone to authenticate to a VPN for work. Not forced with a gun of course, but forced for my paycheck 🙁
This is why I think federation and open standards & protocols are so important. We should always be able to make our own technology choices without being pressured to follow the masses. Unfortunately the tech companies see it as to their advantage that we don’t have these choices and they can pressure us using network effects 🙁
Good.
You might say I have 100% success in converting everyone I know on whatsapp, Haha. Seriously though I don’t know anyone who uses it here. They don’t have nearly the same market share in the US for whatever reason.
It really depends how dominant they are in your market. Now that facebook owns them, whatsapp might actually become more popular here in the US…*shudder*.
The very nature of the service is now gone, i see no reason to stay. I am moving my international texting to Signal. Friends are notified and my new WhatsApp status is “Gone to Signal”. I am confident my friends will follow. Thom, I encourage you to do the same as movements need to start somewhere.
Signal and Matrix are the top secure messaging applications.
My complaints about Signal is that there’s no API, it requires a phone number, the desktop client isn’t great, and there isn’t a way to self-host if I wanted to. Basically, it’s very centralized and autocratic.
I’ve been really liking Matrix. It’s built to be distributed, and it’s meant to be open. It has an API, it can be self-hosted then federated if needed, the official client supports all the platforms and form factors I could want. The video calling uses Jitsi, so it’s not as integrated as others.
Matrix: https://element.io/get-started
I’ve heard good things about Wire and Threema. They’re actual companies though.
Matrix is great as it can be bridged to “legacy” protocols like IRC so everyone can join the chat.
There are many bridges. 🙂 The team and community have been busy.
https://matrix.org/bridges/
+1 for Matrix (with the Element client). It’s basically like email for the modern instant messaging age. You can run your own Matrix server, or you can use public free Matrix servers. All the different Matrix servers can talk to each other, and you can use all sorts of different clients to connect to them. Element is the best one in my opinion.
The best part is that it’s not linked to a phone number. I absolutely will not use a service that depends on a phone number. A username and a password is all I need.
It’s not a matter of open protocols as such. As long as there is a centralized infrastructure controlled by a corporation, there is a risk of data sharing. I wonder what the new rules mean given that Whatsapp boasts end-to-end encryption of messages. One more thing, I personally dislike the app for its inferior community-building capabilities compared to Telegram.
The best possibility I’ve heard is that the client does the data mining, and ships the results to Facebook servers. This would still be E2EE since only data about the data would be sent.
Like anything, depends on the threat model. Is Facebook considered a threat? If not, this is acceptable.
There are better alternatives. Signal is a good Whatsapp clone that may be working to add Snapchat features, and Matrix is much more like IRC or Slack in that it’s channel focused.
And these few posts illustrate the problem nicely. Three posts suggesting alternatives have mentioned three different and incompatible services. Average Joes aren’t going to be jumping between lots of different apps just because one of their 200 contacts decided to be different – you either go with the majority or you don’t, losing out on whatever convenient communications are associated.
Unfortunately, these services cost money to run, and somebody needs to pay that; infrastructure isn’t free. Whether that’s through donations, premium accounts, subscriptions, advertising or sale of data, it needs to come from somewhere. And if they’re owned by a commercial entity, profit needs to be found on top of that. WhatsApp was initially a paid-for service, long before Facebook bought it, and it didn’t gather very much momentum until it dropped the (tiny) subscription and became free. At that point, it exploded and overtook other rival services, but of course, was making a loss. Being monetised one way or another was inevitable.
daedalus,
The network effect usually determines the viability of any particular social platform service, for better and for worse.
That really needs to be qualified with “centralized services” since decentralized P2P services require far less infrastructure – almost free. In the early days of the internet P2P was the defacto method of scaling new services without loads of infrastructure. Furthermore more services used federation (IRC is a good example). Clients like skype were originally built on a P2P model (albeit very proprietary) before MS took it over. Then things started to shift as companies found that despite the added expenses and infrastructure costs, the centralization gave them more leverage to sell ads and control over users. Centralized service providers were making a lot of money. By contrast standardized P2P clients faced more competition, which was good for consumer choice, but bad for business models.
Tech giants have (mostly) declined to provide P2P solutions in favor of centralization that they are able to control and monetize. Even then, we still have some examples of P2P in use today:
Bitcoin relies on P2P to scale to enormous capacity without relying on centralized authority/infrastructure.
Bittorrent is another big one. The costs of centralized infrastructure to handle that kind of load if not for it’s P2P nature would probably be hundreds of billions of dollars over it’s lifetime but because the P2P network offloads all of the heavy lifting you can host extremely popular torrents almost for free.
Windows Updates. It may not be well known, but microsoft has incorporated P2P into it’s windows 10 updates:
https://techjourney.net/enable-or-disable-peer-to-peer-p2p-apps-updates-download-from-more-than-one-place-in-windows-10/
P2P is so much more efficient especially in their case since they’ve got hundreds of millions of users downloading the exact same updates at the same time. Not only does this save MS tons of money on infrastructure every year, but because P2P optimizes for network locality, it can significantly reduce load on the internet backbone and even local networks (ie you & your neighbors can download updates locally using P2P without having to download the same large updates thousands of times over from upstream).
As you can tell, I’m a big fan of P2P networks, but it’s main detractor is business models that strongly prefer centralization. For better or worse this dictates that most of the services being pushed on us focus on centralized models rather than P2P despite the high costs of centralized infrastructure.
Yeah, it’s tough to be financially viable when users flock to free. Advertising has been one of the few business models to thrive under these conditions even though ads are often dispised by users for making things worse and wasting our time. But it’s what we get for being cheap.
Putting aside questions about billionaires and billionaire owned media Elon Musk is reported in Business Insider as calling on people to move to Signal.
https://www.businessinsider.com/whatsapp-forcing-users-to-share-personal-data-facebook-elon-musk-2021-1
Neither ‘Average Joe’ nor me – I earn my life as computer programmer – is going to switch between messaging apps because one or ten contacts are using a different one; I agree with you.
But on other hand, most of the ‘Average Joe’ people are stupid. After being a free service, in 2013 – one year before Facebook acquisition – WhatsApp began to charge its users 1 EUR / year. Believe or not, many ‘Average Joe’ bitterly protested against it.
@Thom
I simply refuse to use it and mandate phone, email, or Skype (which itself has problems but works on the desktop as well as phone). I don’t want security or privacy nightmares I have to constantly watch or manage nor want to spend my life juggling half a dozen different applications which change as the fashion changes.
As an American who has to deal with cheap, crappy network providers, pushing that onto ISPs or telcos sounds even worse. I’m scarred by US telcos and ISPs from the ’90s. I prefer my services to be discrete and separate.
It’s also not like ISPs wouldn’t/don’t do the same type of data mining Facebook or Google is doing. They’ve proven to be just as scummy.
Anyway, Matrix is working on something like this. It’s not P2P, but it’s decentralized and federated.
Now that I think about it, I don’t think there is anything stopping someone from creating a P2P network which interfaces with the larger Matrix ecosystem.
P2P video conferences (N:N) aren’t feasible without a central server muxing the streams together. P2P conference calls (N:N) maybe.
Not everywhere is America. Better infrastructure and GDPR in Europe for a start.
I do agree this kind of thing is a wake up call. Most tech literate people knew we were being had but most people don’t plus the hedge fund backed marketting campaings do swing things no matter how hard you try to fight back.
Which is why I prefaced the statement with “As an American…” We live in a capitalist, dystopian hellhole so you don’t have to. 🙂
The problem is more capitalism and incompetence. Things like SIP servers, which would be a free services, wouldn’t get much investment, and they would have every incentive to make it as tough as possible to port accounts to anything else.
Privacy legislation would keep ISPs/telcos from data mining traffic by default. It’s not going to stop them from figuring out how to get around that or to trick/incentivize people to opt in.
People also don’t care. It’s not intrusive, so they don’t care. It’s pervasive, but not intrusive. They even think the data collection is a valuable service.
I have a free SIP server account somewhere. They seem popular in Germany although Brexit buggers things up. SIP is encrypted although landline to internet is dodgy as calls go unencrypted via the server instead of P2P. You can also do SIP with someone’s IP address so don’t even need a server.
Me too. There are a lot of businesses that only want to do business via WhatsApp, but to me that’s a sign of a shady company and I don’t deal with them. And I figure that if anybody really needs to get a hold of me they can do so with a traditional phone call, or else I send them a Jitsi Meet link. And close friends that want to chat with me regularly can create a Matrix account.
But I’ve also observed what Thom mentions about WhatsApp completely dominating the communication field. It’s truly shocking. I now have to call people on the phone to tell them when I send them an email; nobody sees or replies to their email. Hardly anybody uses their laptop or desktop computer for anything anymore. They just peruse content from their never-ending stream of WhatsApp status messages and Facebook posts. Almost everyone uses their WhatsApp as a universal data store. Need an account number? Just swipe the screen like a madmonkey until you reach that part in the conversation history 4 months ago with someone. There are even lots of cell providers with segregated plans for “unlimited WhatsApp and Facebook” or cheap one-off payments for “15 days of WhatsApp and Facebook”. But then “navigating the internet” as they put it costs an exorbitant per/MB rate or else you can get an extremely limited monthly data plan. So it’s exactly what everyone warned about regarding net neutrality, or the lack thereof.
@rahim123
I forgot about Jitsi. I have used this and always foprget about it. That’s a useful alternative, thanks. I recommend OBS (free and open source) if you need your webcam colour grading etctera.
Depending on what data they’re going to share, I fail to see how this could be GDPR compliant. It’d be interesting to see what the EU is going to do about this.
The cynic in me says whatever they might do will be about as effective as the cookie law. I’m guessing Facebook will slip them a fat cash bribe–oh, sorry, a charitable donation–and they’ll pass something that uses a large amount of words to say and do virtually nothing. Who knows though, maybe I’ll actually be surprised this time. A fellow can dream.
GDPR budged the needle on privacy so I wouldn’t be too cynical. Too much cynicism is bad for mental health and plays straight into the hands of even worse people.
Given that the GDPR took over a decade to work out, it’s nigh impossible to change it at short notice.
Didn’t they already claim not to share data of users in the EU? Of course they will but only in secret so no problems with GDPR.
We all have a choice. We need to accept our responsibility in this. If we don’t like where big tech is headed (and I certainly don’t) then we have to accept the need to stick by our principals and accept some inconvenience for a time. If enough people did that and made it known why, perhaps Facebook would back off. Of course, it wouldn’t stop them from trying again in a few years. Surely we all knew this was coming, back when Facebook bought WhatsApp. Regardless of their assurrances to the contrary, we all must have realized it would be a matter of time.
As for me, I’ve made my choice. I deleted my Facebook account back in 2015. I’m keeping my ties cut, so bye-bye WhatsApp!
You do have a choice. I understand your position, since I’m in the same situation: I moved to another country and everyone back home uses WhatsApp and everyone pushes me to use it, but I just refuse to do so. They have other ways to reach out to me and vice versa. End of conversation.
I expected this would happen eventually, since FB acquired them. I considered leaving then, but this is enough push to make me go now. Since the big tech corona dystopia keeps getting worse I am considering dumping the smartphone entirely.
I have an old school feature phone as well as a smartphone. I usually leave my smartphone at home when going anywhere. Ouside of calls it’s main use is a glorified mini tablet. I prefer meeting people in-person and expect phones to be off when with company. I don’t care about having a bazillion followers on social media and broadcast only egos irritate me so I never use it. The most use my smartphone gets is as a desk clock. It’s mentally unhealthy to have a smartphone in the bedroom so I leave it on my desk at night.
I like the potential of smartphones so glad I have one but beyond necessary phone calls if I’m spending more than 1-10 minutes a month fiddling with one I think this would be a problem.
Luke McCarthy,
It’s a shame that despite all the smartphone competitors we’ve seen over the course of history we’ve ultimately ended up with such an extremely concentrated duopoly. I tried to make the best of it by using lineageOS, an android fork that at least freed me from a google dependency. But recently one of my regular clients bought into a cloud VPN service that have a hard dependency on google services. I resisted and pushed back, but in the end they forced my hand and I had to get a phone with stock android. I am so annoyed that employers, banks, etc force us to have phones in the apple/android duopoloy. These network effects are so strong that I believe this lack of competition is going to be permanent for our lifetimes. There’s only one path I see to realistically displace the incumbents at this point, and that’s through government intervention. Unfortunately the countries most inclined to intervene are authoritarian countries like china where the communist party has ulterior motives rather than just promoting healthy competition and consumer choice.
A bit off-topic, but this made the news just recently…
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/dozens-hong-kong-pro-democracy-figures-reportedly-arrested-n1252934
It makes me sad & angry to see just how quickly Hong Kong is loosing its battle for democracy with china dictating Hong Kong’s laws 🙁
Wait, you mean the same government that is pushing these networks to share data with them and sensor in the first place? Yeah… what a grand idea that is!
Sarcasm aside, I really do not understand this line of thought. Big tech is doing what they do, right now, to push the government’s agenda for the most part. Why in the world would you think regulation from the very body they are helping would accomplish this? Please, someone, explain this lack of logic to me!
darknexus,
There’s no lack of logic, some corporations are becoming so powerful that governments are the only entities capable of reigning them in.
In many ways capitalism mirrors the game of monopoly. At the beginning things can start out more fair; it’s a mix of skill and luck but everyone has a chance. This is the idealized version of capitalism. But at some point the players holding a disproportionately large share of the world’s assets become so wealthy and powerful that they become unstoppable. There’s no merit, there’s no competition, no opponent can gain any leverage regardless of skill (even collectively). Once the game reaches this state, it’s “over”, and needs a reset. But in real life capitalism does not end and we don’t get resets.
I don’t strictly have confidence in governments to do the right thing (even this thread indicates otherwise). But I am pointing out that once corporations become powerful enough to kill off their competition, it’s game over for merit based capitalism. Most of the working class, even collectively cannot match the assets of the wealthy. For better or worse governments are the only entities capable of regulating businesses and providing some balance to the markets. If we should fail to get our governments to represent us, then there is zero doubt about where we are headed: the return of the capitalist robber barrons of centuries past.
I understand there’s a lot of resentment towards government, and I agree there’s a ton of corruption, which we need to fight. But the truth is that if we turn government into the enemy, that just plays into the hands of corporations that will keep getting more powerful without regulation.
We’ll be your friends Thom. 🙂
Which reminds me, is there a Matrix channel anyone hangs out in?
Flatland_Spider,
That’s a good idea. Thom, would you be able to join if we scheduled a “powwow”? Haha.
I’m on mobile broadband so nothing too heavy.
HollyB,
Yeah, I quickly run through my data quotas too when exclusively using mobile.
I don’t think Thom is interested in fraternizing with his users, haha.
Is anyone else interested? If so I can try and set something up.
@alfman
My laptop has 3G and can work just not where it is placed. I use a 4G phone as a hotspot and an 80GB PAYG 30 day tariff for £20. Not bad and covers my browsing/update/youtube habits. As long as any solution scales the video I have enough slack for hours and hours of use. I’m just worried about whether slightly ropey 4G could cope with a group session.
As for any conversation I’ll merrily demolish a glass or two of wine on the sofa.
HollyB,
Living in the US, I’d call that a bargin, haha. I have broadband at home, but my parents house does not and during the pandemic they’ve been doing a lot more video stuff online. They’ve been running out their data quota (it’s “unlimited” BTW, which is a load of crock) and having to pay something like $10 for each additional 10GB on top of the regular monthly fees.
The US has mostly allowed the carriers to do as they please and legislators even rolled back net neutrality. So disappointing! Argh! This is why the US is behind when it comes to broadband and it’s a hot button issue for so many of us. Anyways, enough ranting, haha.
I enjoy a good pilsner.
I was also worried at first, but it seems that EU and UK users are safe for now …
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55573149
Dutch MEP Paul Tang tweeted: “Facebook grants itself access to all of our WhatsApp-data unless…. you are living in the EU.
“That is why data protection matters.”
One follow on point I have noticed is a lot of big companies especially who have ruthless business practices say they are simply following the law and throw the obligation back on people to lobby for the law to be changed. I find this a distraction and more than a little disengenous. It’s a form of gaslighting and victim blaming. It’s right up there with if they didn’t do it someone else would. With the guts being ripped out of governance and the postwar settlement even with the benfeit of EU law before Brexit the post-Brexit UK is a scary place to be.
Thom, let’s pretend for a minute that you aren’t fake-forced into agreeing to the new WhatsApp TOS. While you may believe your ability to contact your friends has become far more difficult you could always just, and I know this is going to sound absolutely insane, but you could always just…call them. There, I said it! I know the thought is scary and unthinkable but it’s true. Your connection to your friends does not solely depend on your use of WhatsApp, or lack thereof. If calling them is too terrifying to consider, there’s always email.. Or, real mail and the long lost art of writing somebody.
I’ll second that. Nobody is forcing us. We still have self-autonomy.
The ultimatum doesn’t apply to EU citizens, so why are you covering it or pretending you had to agree to anything new?
We are saved from this by it being against EU regulations.
Yes, I do agree with you, that’s is totally right https://kokaqueen.com