A thought experiment in what we built without noticing.

A thought experiment in what we built without noticing.

  • biscuit@lemdro.idEnglish
    81·
    4 days ago

    Unfortunately WhatsApp managed to take hold of the Zeitgeist during the early 2010s when some European carriers were still charging for texts or charging lots for data.

    The fact Meta was allowed to buy WhatsApp is a travesty. We’re supposed to just trust that Meta isn’t lying when it says it isn’t looking at the E2EE keys? Come on. We have literal governments using it as a communication tool.

    • adhdsergio@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      They don’t even have to look at the keys, they have the app, can encrypt your messages with their key, or send the plain text contents separately, or who knows what else. Plus your recipients are not encrypted like in signal for instance where security is a foundational requirement. Anyone done any sort of audit?

  • yetAnotherUser@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    […] But before we dive into this thought experiment, however, it’s worth establishing what we’re actually talking about, as readers in most of Europe and North America underestimate WhatsApp by an order of magnitude, primarily because in those markets it functions as one platforms among many. That is, however, not how the rest of the planet works. […]

    Great read.

            • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
              1·
              7 hours ago

              Seems perfectly safe and scriptless to me, but I understand the caution.

              Summary is that in South America, Africa and South Asia among others have huge parts of their economic, healthcare, disaster response and even government functions running on it. WhatsApp Pay and WhatsApp for business communication (particularly small businesses), doctors coordinating over large distances, Syria’s White Helmets (serving as replacement for defunct emergency services), migrants communicating with families, migrant workers making sure the payment they sent home arrives properly…

              In all those places and for all those people, WhatsApp shutting down would cause disastrous disruptions. Even during previous outages of a few hours, smaller businesses lost a lot of money.

              The knock-on effects would probably be felt world-wide. WhatsApp has managed to worm its way into so many important places that the dependency is hard to break, much like Instagram has become an important platforms for small businesses to market themselves. And a sudden mass-migration to Signal or Telegram might overload their servers, if they’re not built to handle the same scale. Matrix is technically more complicated for smaller businesses that can’t easily redirect internal resources or hire external contractors or service providers.

              The ones least affected by such a shutdown would be the bigger companies with more resilient infrastructure, redundant alternative systems and the capacity to quickly roll out other tools (such as setting up matrix servers).

              This dependency on a central service would be a terrible risk, even if it were the most good-natured, honest, charitable organisation running it. We both know Meta is far worse.

    • rnercle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      4 days ago

      Whatsapp is just more shitty Meta product… Can’t be trusted.

      Meta is just more shitty Facebook rebranding… Can’t be trusted.

      :)

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        They’ve probably re-engineered it since the acquisition, in order to make it easier to further enshittify it and to spy on their users more effectively.

        Like Microsoft did to Skype.

  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    4 days ago

    I’d love to have no WhatsApp in my life. Many years ago, I signed off it as I did with Facebook. Sadly, because of where we are at the moment, my partner is now the main hub for communication with businesses and people who don’t care about or aren’t aware of Meta’s privacy practices. After many arguments, I’m now being forced to share the communication responsibilities and reinstall WhatsApp.

    For those who can, I read a suggestion once that struck me with its simplicity: turn your account into a business one and set an automatic reply letting anyone who messages you know that you’ve moved permanently and how to find you.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      maybe you could keep whatsapp on the cheapest phone you can find. it can also probably be turned off when not being used. this is what I would do.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        This is what I ended up doing. People know I don’t reply on it, so they don’t even try. I use it for keeping tabs of my toll both spends and my electricity company only. Not a single personal contact on it.

    • sageEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      Or, if you’re technical, install Matrix server with Whatsapp bridge.

  • Wioum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    Let’s start by understanding the sheer scale of WhatsApp. The Meta owned and operated messenger has roughly 3.3 billion monthly active users

    Had to reread that, cause Messenger is also a Meta chat service …

  • Zagorath@quokk.auEnglish
    9·
    4 days ago

    Here’s my thought experiment: nothing changes.

    I have literally never used it. I have one very simple rule for chat apps that I hold to over everything else. The user identifier must be a username or email address. It must absolutely not be a phone number or something else that intrinsically ties it to a specific device. What’s App has failed that test since before Facebook bought it. In a world where we have multiple devices and move between them often, it has always been insane to me that other people don’t think there’s a problem with using a phone number as a unique identifier for an individual. And it only gets even worse when you start adding international travel, changing your phone number, etc. into the mix.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyzEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    I’d just call (ok, text) one or two people who manage whatsapp groups I use the most and ask them to recreate the groups in some other platform, preferrably signal/element or such and add everyone back (via email preferrably). It would be a weird day for people with tons of contacts and groups…but it would not be a calamity…right?