> I will close my account.
And here lies the issue. Just you closing the account doesn't work. Your friends, your family, others you talk to on whatsapp shall also migrate. And that's the biggest issue.
I previously closed a ton of other social media accounts and guess what, my friends are still my friends and my family has not abandoned me. In fact I have more time for friends and family now. In hind-sight most social media use was just a giant waste of my time. Now people just call me or send me an e-mail when they need to contact me. Signal-to-noise is much better.
iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive, and not using Whatsapp would be social ostracisation since Android has a bigger market share than in the US.
In Mexico a lot of businesses have support numbers via Whatsapp. Heck, you can even order food and other stuff like LPG gas.
> > iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive
> But iMessage is free. It just uses your phone's internet connection, just like Whatsapp
Except when you're sending a message to someone who isn't an iMessage user, or if the "Send as SMS" option is enabled, resulting in what you thought was an iMessage becoming an SMS/MMS.
The blue/green colour difference, as well as the light grey text in the input field, isn't always immediately obvious.
By contrast, Whatsapp is always free. You can't send someone a message on Whatsapp and discover it's gone out as an SMS/MMS after the fact.
I know half of HN hates Telegram and I like it less than when I started moving (and to my defense that was before WhatsApp improved their crypto from close to nothing to state-of-the-art.)
It has served us well but I don't like the constant bragging combined with breaking a number of best practices and I'm looking for alternatives now and might start moving users to a system that stresses me less sometime during the next year. Alternatives right now are signal, matrix etc.
(Did I regret moving away from WhatsApp after they fixed their crypto? Not at all: they still uploaded all chats and sneakily tried to use all WhatsApp data to feed their spam cannon.
Matrix is certainly worth taking a look at. I always liked how whatsapp and telegram mobile apps were very snappy. That's something that is going to be fixed in riot quite soon, apparently.
I don’t know about chat, but i’m quite sure they didn’t just try to use WhatsApp metadata, but rather put it to full use. I believe they even admitted so.
I don't know about chromeos in general, I was specifically talking about the newly announced pixel slate. The hardware seems promising, not sure about the software.
You make a very compelling argument. I'm also wondering, that yes, currently our interests are aligned (privacy intrusion for value), what if they're no longer aligned?, Or what if they're compromised? Well, I'm screwed then (as others have outlined).
Sousveillance is a useful goal because it would provide greater opportunity to know when your interests are no longer aligned. Right now a company may publish a privacy policy and say one thing about their interests, but do another and not admit to it. An authority bigger than them might hold them accountable (governments, shareholders), but what if users could be their own watchdogs?
As for compromises, typically the assumptions in Transparency situations is that the damage is mitigated if it was already transparent (everyone already knows, or already has some other way to access that data, so compromise is less of a big deal). Admittedly, there's a lot of cultural hurdles involved to make everything transparent, including "deweaponizing" a lot of people's secrets/getting used to the fact that everyone probably has skeletons in their closet and to stop using that against each other.
I'm not even sure that full transparency could work in the real world [1], but starting from the assumption that privacy is dead anyway, transparency options seem some of the best alternatives to pursue (instead of trying to put all the monsters back into Pandora's box, let's try for hope and compromise).
[1] An interesting argument is that full transparency was the actual state of early tribal humankind. Gossip networks held tribes together. Everyone knew everyone's else's business, just because of human social dynamics and the way that we know tight-knit communities work. From that perspective privacy is a "modern" thing, and possibly even a fluke of modern civilization, though certainly many here would classify it a feature more than a bug.
2. I'm wondering (as others have outlined) that, granted they do give me value today at the risk of my privacy, but what about the future, what if there motives change, that can affect me in insidious ways.
