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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

"As we stand now even Signal is not safe because of the business model."

Ok, good, but you do realize that this is the most existential concern of them all?

Why does FB so aggressively pursue personal data?

For advertising. Because 'that's the business model'.

Do you think that any entity would be in that position if say, people were willing to actually pay $3/month for what seems to be very obviously a highly useful service?

Maybe, but probably not.

If people would pay for value, there at least would be considerably less incentive to have personal data.

People seem to be willing to pay Apple and AT&T through the nose, oddly, not for those creating the services themselves.

"We get what we pay for".

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But that is the thing. WhatsApp used to be a payed app, and the promise was that they would never sell our use your data for adds. Then they sold to Facebook and broke that promise. I used to pay for WhatsApp because I believed them then. And it got big because of many people did that too. That is the thing that I found the most insulting about WhatsApp now.

"Then they sold to Facebook and broke that promise."

This is really a false narrative.

The 'sell out' was the 'sale to Facebook'.

A business is not really going to necessarily keep that kind of promise, they are going to do what's best for them - that's why they made the acquisition.

This idea that the WA founders could somehow hold Zuck to that 'promise' is fantasty. They are not naive, they knew what they were doing.

Not only did they know there was nothing they could do otherwise, but that there would be an existential pull from FB to push for data sharing that would be unavoidable.

The 'moral high ground' that the founders tried to take in public is really kind of despicable, because they knew exactly the cards in play when they sold.

If the 'promise' was to do with branding, or something secondary, but fine. But you don't sell drugs to a drug dealer with the promise that the dealer won't deal drugs.

Anyhow, we are where we are. People should fork over $1 month for chat. It would make a big difference.

You seem to be contradicting yourself - that is was never a good idea to believe their promise and pay for their chat service, but that also this problem would be solved if everyone paid for a chat service.

Those are not contradictions.

1) A sale to an advertising company will result in WA data being used for Ad sales, there's no reason to believe otherwise.

2) Paid apps would be ideal for privacy, but I didn't imply that people were necessarily willing to pay for it.

The problem frankly is not 'Facebook' it's us.

We want 'all the privacy' for 'free'. If we paid a small amount, we could have privacy because there'd be an underlying supportable business model.

Right but WhatsApp was a paid app. There is no reason to believe that paid apps are ideal for privacy - WhatsApp is the perfect counterexample. So we need a different solution, or direct payment at leasts needs to be one part of a larger solution.

Yeah, and that's the major issue with Signal/Telegram. They also have to pay the operational costs at the end of the day.

Apple's services can be ad free because they hide the cost in the cost of phone but that is extremely anti competitive.

A user on an iPhone will have a hard time rationalizing for Signal which says $3 per month when he looks at iMessage and that is free

Telegram has infinite history while Signal has PFS. So the costs are not the same at all.

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