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Comment by Doches | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, Meta has said the same thing re: WhatsApp, so while Apple deserves _some_ credit here for sticking to their principles, they're not exactly leading the pack. Which brings home the point that if _Meta_ isn't onboard with your privacy-obliterating proposal then you know you've really lost the plot...

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In even more fairness, Meta has literally skipped the EU for Threads instead of increasing privacy. In their case, it's just a careful balance of virtue signaling, it had no qualms about pushing their spyware to hundreds of millions of people, violating basic human rights in the process.

Check Article 12:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

Your comment would have been stronger if you left out the piece re: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because it's an eye roller. Article 12 is:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

I'm no fan of Meta or their privacy violations, but saying that voluntarily downloading an app (which by the way does clearly outline their privacy practices) is equivalent to having my humans rights violated just really waters down what "human rights" should mean.

> voluntarily downloading an app

that's all true until an app becomes the only way to interact with certain groups of people. i certainly wouldn't call my usage of Discord voluntary. it doesn't actually matter how often i read their privacy policy and shake my head. either I break off contact with a large part of the internet that's important to me or I begrudgingly agree "voluntarily" to their terms and conditions.

May I ask, what compels you to use discord if it's not voluntary? It's absolutely impossible to use keybase or signal?

Have you ever actually tried to convince a non-technical friend or family member to use a different platform for communicating? Now try that with 10 people at the same time. The only reason Discord ever became successful is the huge vacuum of good UX that existed before it. A fragmentation of Skype, Steam, XFire, Teamspeak, Vent and Mumble. Jabber if you were playing certain MMOs. Signal and Keybase aren't even close either. Matrix is a little better, but still far off, and they have the Mastodon problem where explaining federation turns off normal peoples brains.

And aside from that, a lot of software communities are on Discord now. People are gating download links behind it, use their threading feature for support and put their knowledge base in channels. And not just small communities and developers. ASUS has made their main communication channel Discord too.

I understand! It's just that I never had to download Discord for anything.

I agree it's difficult. I've had success showing keybase to people because of how barebones simple it is - but it's not a solution for everything of course.

> Have you ever actually tried to convince a non-technical friend or family member to use a different platform for communicating

How many non technical people have heard of Discord?

Essentially everyone my age and down? I'm a late millennial.

If the number in your name is your birth year I'm not too surprised, but don't assume you can project from your own experience onto others 1:1.

How many millennials on down are “non technical” at least to the point that they can’t download an app?

You are a very ignorant if you think there is no barrier to getting someone to try an app with a substantially less good UX than what someone's currently using, and that that barrier doesn't border impossible in a group of 10.

I can't even get my wife to install Element - and she works in tech as a senior python / automation engineer. People want neatness on their phone and low total complexity, and installing a messenger for a single person is over the line for most.

You have insults I have numbers. We are not the same…

> You are a very ignorant if you think there is no barrier to getting someone to try an app with a substantially less good UX than what someone's currently using, and that that barrier doesn't border impossible in a group of 10.

Yet many people do have multiple messaging apps.

And Discord the one you think is so popular is not even in the top 10…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-glob...

They aren’t counting iMessage as a separate app. But do you really think it wouldn’t rank above Discord?

> I can't even get my wife to install Element - and she works in tech as a senior python / automation engineer.

Maybe your enlightened millennial friends and family aren’t as willing to change as you think they are?

> People want neatness on their phone and low total complexity,

Yet the average person has 35 apps on their phone

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...

You clearly dont have many friends or relatives that you actually interact with

I sure wonder how anyone interacted with friends and family before discord eh?

Not even that, if I’m not mistaken Facebook imported contacts from users agenda and then allow third part apps to access the information, so even if you didn’t have a Facebook, you data was leaked.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-data-leak-contact-impor...

So what you're really complaining about is that other people will not follow your choices. If your relations have such a hard line that a single app is "the only way to interact with certain groups of people", they are the ones to blame, not the maker of the app.

I'm afraid life (at least mine) is way more complicated than that.

I have a mobile phone SIM which only provides customer support over WhatsApp.

This isn't compulsory, it's just personally beneficial. There are plenty of beneficial contexts you need to opt into, and include some cost or compromise.

People miss the forest for the trees here. Democratic society needs a way for people to communicate freely. Those ways are dying out fast.

In modern life, people don't discuss politics in townhalls, pubs, or whatever anymore. Online communication is by now far too siloed and supervised to the point of being unusable. Media are one-way streets, pushing the agenda of billionaires.

But you need to be able to have controversial discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being ostracised. You need to have a back-channel to give feedback to "higher ups". Etc.pp.

A society where the individual is degraded to a mere drone (even if only loosely via framing) controlled by the "hive mind", without any recourse to voice constructive criticism is a lot of things, but certainly no democracy. There looms a dystopia on our doorstep.

To be honest, I think you've got at least part of it backwards.

> But you need to be able to have controversial discussions about "heavy" topics without fear of being ostracised.

Uh, why? People should have freedom of speech, but it feels like a lot of people want freedom from the consequences of the their speech. If anything, I think a lot of our current social disharmony is a direct result of the extremely recent development of people being able to mouth offline with very little social constraints.

Mike Tyson probably said it best: "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."

Someone is forcing you to use Discord? An app that I personally have never used?

You are rude enough that I'm tempted to say "OK Boomer" because you clearly are a different generation with no insight into mine.

So is there now a law saying that you must use Discord?

I'm flagging this, this must be trolling.

So his use of Discord is “not voluntary” even though it doesn’t rank as one of the top 7 messenger apps?

I think that the problem is that Meta has normalized this violation so it doesn't feel like a big deal. It feels watered down even for someone like you who appears to be very aware of the problem.

It's like exploited workers and people living in quasi-slavery, many of them don't understand their rights and "voluntarily" waive them. My parents didn't really understand the implications of "voluntarily" accepting Meta's privacy statement - once I explained it to them, they were in complete horror.

>attacks upon his honour and reputation

Yikes, seems like this is built to keep people from saying things about powerful people that they don't like.

It’s just that there was a time in Europe (about 80 years ago) when among other cruel things, the honor and reputation of a lot of people were actively destroyed for arbitrary reasons.

Can you clarify what you are talking about?

Arguably it's not the voluntary downloading of an app that's the problem; it's the mandatory government imposition of privacy interference across all apps.

>> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation

If I cannot attack the honor and reputation of a person, and by extension, artificial person like a corporation, what good is freedom of speech? How can I call someone out for being a scammer, or for doing horrible things? How does one seek public redress of a grievance against a company, or an agent of the government? Does arbitrary apply to timing, or the circumstance? Who is the arbiter of arbitrary? This is not a human right. It is a nice tool for a tyrannical government to strip away rights from people. Oh, you've violated Mr. Arresting Officer by accusing him of falsely arresting you. Now you get to deal with the false arrest and a human rights crime. Likewise, Ms. Bought a Mansion with Public Money can no longer be accused because she has a human right to not have to trifle with public accountability.

I don’t think it’s because of not wanting to preserve privacy I think it’s because it takes a shit ton of time to comply with all the orders the EU has pinned on them.

It takes a shit ton of time if to weasel around the GDPR if your business model is to collect as much personal data as possible.

Threads is already GDPR compliant, that's not the only regulation the EU has made that covers these kinds of apps.

Meta already have Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp in compliance with EU legislation.

Threads is not an attempt to push spyware on users, that would be incompliant in the EU. (And what is this spyware you believe is in Threads?) More likely they know exactly how much work it entails to be compliant and they decided to initially skip the EU market to speed up their launch.

And in even more fairness, privacy was not the reason Threads didn’t launch in the EU. It is in violation of the digital markers act, not GDPR. The leveraging of market power in one platform to boost another platform is what is at fault, and seeing the meteoric rise of Threads on the back of Instagram’s popularity the stratagem worked.

EU DMA and I don't think it really has to do with privacy at all.

Is WhatsApp still requiring access to your phone's address book before it allows you to use it? It did last time I tried it. There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving me their details. At the time I set up a virtual android environment (samsung called it knox) just to setup WhatsApp in a way it couldn't access my phone's address book. It is extremely unethical on Meta's side to continue with this requirement. So I'm dubious every te they're presented as champions of privacy protection.

> There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving me their details.

The sad thing is that all their details and yours are already known to Meta.

The dozen of us who behave like you will keep trying though.

I currently have WhatsApp installed without access to my address book (on Android). It doesn't require it, but it makes it harder to use and locks out some features. Among other things, you can't start a new group / direct message, but you can participate / reply if someone else messages you first.

I use an app called "Open In WhatsApp" which lets you paste / write a phone number and it will open a conversation with that number (by using android intents). You can also share contacts from the Phone app to this App, so you don't have to copy/paste manually.

https://github.com/SubhamTyagi/openinwa (I recommend downloading from f-droid)

If only there were a strong, centralized app store that could perform app review and prevent applications from degrading user experience beyond the extent actually necessary without that permission.

Good thing the EU just outlawed that model and forced everyone to support "third party app stores" that are thinly-veiled shells for Facebook/Google/etc to bypass that review process.

the "I wanna sideload" crowd are nothing more than allies of convenience for FB and others. Facebook was already experimenting with getting users to manually sideload the full-telemetry build and now they can just say "oops not supported on safari, install the native app".

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

It's kinda the point of WhatsApp tho, phone features using your phone number and phone book but over the internet.

The Phone app on my iPhone manages to do all of those things without uploading my contacts list/social graph to anybody else’s servers though.

I recently had to install whatsapp. No asking for contacts at all. The web app (via a qr code) is ok, and i run that in a vm set up just for wa. I don't let friends and fam know i have it...I prefer keeping out of dramas, 'news', and memes. I did check that i do not appear as 'x is online' on anyone's phone (but only checked with the person i needed to wa with). The app isn't bad, tbf. It's just not for me.

I think Meta _needs_ WhatsApp to be their loss-leader (not really, but you know) when it comes to security. They always get to say "oh but WhatsApp is E2E!! We do care about security!"

Messenger also has e2e, but it's opt in.

I mean Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G.

It's called market shift.

Automative manufactures didn't give a rats ass about fuel economy until customers wanted it.

> Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G

That’s not true. Apple was position itself as being better at security than Microsoft long before Google was selling devices to people.

For example:

https://youtu.be/VuqZ8AqmLPY

Apple sold itself as having better security.

It's debatable whether or not that was true, and even if you believed it it was up for another debate whether that security was by design or because Apple's vanishingly small share of the PC market made it uneconomical to write malware targeting OSX.

This isn't to say that Microsoft was doing security properly back then either, they weren't.

True, but security and privacy are different things. At most, one could say that security is necessary-but-not-sufficient for privacy.

Google is generally excellent at security, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a nightmare for privacy.

Hmm, might want to reconsider that [1]

[1]https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_ma....

security isn't privacy, and technology isn't a public policy alignment

I was responding to a comment directly mentioning 'security'

Also multiple celebrities had their nudes stolen from their iCloud.

>Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point

I don't much care. Companies don't have ethics, they have fiscal goals. If Apples fiscal goals happen to line up with my own goals, so much the better.

I would tend to trust a company who is doing something to selfishly support the bottom line way easier than I would trust a company who claims to be doing it for the common good of all humanity.

Google famously started off trying to not be evil and also be a profitable company simultaneously. It didn't work out great in that one of those goals became slightly more important than the other.

The ironic thing is that WhatsApp very heavily pushes users into Google account backups, which are unencrypted, giving government agencies all the access they want.

I remember some talk about those getting encrypted, don't k ow if that has happened yet.

it happened in 2021, and some form of encryption for whatsapp icloud backups has apparently been available since 2016

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/whatsapp-encrypted-backups

You can encrypt the Google drive backup actually. It's just a toggle switch on the backup menu setting to enable it.

They seems to be end to end encrypted now. It asked me a password to encrypt the backup with. It's a recent feature and you must trust a closed source app. No idea of I can download the backup from Google drive with a web browser and decrypt it with some common decryption program.

If anything that's a bolder move considering everyone uses Whatsapp there and barely anyone uses iMessage

Both are very popular in the UK.

WhatsApp is used by 78% of the users in the UK, and iMessage is used by 25%.

https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997945/most-used-messenge... (non-free link)

25% of the entire population is a pretty popular application! Not “hardly anyone”. Also, I’d like to know the volume of messages shared, I have WhatsApp, but wouldn’t miss it it it disappeared. iMessage disappearing would be very inconvenient.

I'm surprised it's even 25% in the UK, and I wonder how that's measured. Maybe the 25% includes things like "opening the iMessage app to read SMS messages sent by two-factor authentication services" etc.

I’m not surprised, SMSing people is still common, and sliding from that to iMessage is totally frictionless for iPhone users. With iOS market share being around 50%, I’m surprised (skeptical even!) that it’s not closer to 50%.

But who is that 25%? iPhone users have money. I’m sure there is some significant overlap between iMessage and WhatsApp users (I know I and everyone I know use(s) both). But if you threaten politicians with losing their blue bubbles they’re gonna fall in line.

No one in Europe cares about the blue bubbles.

I prefer iMessage over the other messengers, but I still haven’t met anyone who cares. A lot of people don’t even know why the bubbles are sometimes green.

Yet, the EU have their panties in a knot about having it be interoperable…

> But if you threaten politicians with losing their blue bubbles they’re gonna fall in line.

This is not a thing outside the United States, and I doubt that most British politicians are even aware of 'blue bubbles'.

For example, the recent controversy regarding the release of Covid-related government communications was centred on WhatsApp, with no reference to other platforms like iMessage.

https://news.sky.com/story/politicians-are-drawn-to-whatsapp...

I've noticed that too and it is super annoying having family in the UK that will only communicate via Whatsapp. Is this because cell providers outside the US charge for SMS? Even the ones who have iPhones end up using it because it is too much of a pain to use separate messaging apps.

SMS is cheap now but wasn't universally when Whatsapp gained critical mass.

Nowadays it's mostly about convenience and features compared to SMS, and iPhone has a much smaller marker share in Europe so iMessage isn't a thing.

I beg to differ. iMessage is definitely quite common in Europe as well.

iPhone has like a 33% market share so I wouldn't call it common if you can't reach 2 out of 3 people on it at least.

In contrast, in many European countries Whatsapp has 90%+ penetration [1]. Even where it's relatively unused it's more common than iMessage.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

It is mostly because international SMS and MMS is not free. People in the UK travel more to other countries, and communicate more with people in other countries.

Not to mention MMS is vastly inferior to WhatsApp and iMessage for sharing media and other information.

It's because SMS is simply inferior to Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Line, kakaotalk, Snapchat, Signal, etc unless you own an iPhone. All of them are cross platform and aren't intentionally broken for people who don't have or use iMessage. I personally avoid giving out my phone number as much as possible as all the other platforms have much better tools for communication, blocking, media, etc.

To add to that, I can use the WhatsApp desktop app at work. Can’t do that with iMessage.

Why not? I do.

Non Apple work machine?

Of course, it’s Linux.

Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit (against you or against the company). That's assuming it's not already strictly forbidden by the company rules to prevent you from sending yourself confidential data.

Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.

> Signing into your personal accounts on a work machine is a terrible idea, as it opens up your personal accounts to search if there is a lawsuit

The machine is mine and I do work on it. Thanks for the concern but I’m not worried about getting sued. I’m sure it’s happened here previously, but it’s not like the US.

> Also outside of programmers, IT, and designers, you rarely get a choice in the company issued laptop. It never makes sense for a company to issue more expensive Apple computers instead of ThinkPads or Dell computers.

I’m not one of those professionals and I can get my job done quicker on a Mac. My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want. I think this is a good thing.

Any job that requires a crappy trackpad isn't a job worth having.

Anyone working on a trackpad all day probably isn’t doing serious work ;) see we can all make unkind generalizations.

Touché.

Just seeing those laptops is frustrating. What is the point of the trackpad if you have to use a mouse?

When you need to travel between workstations I work docked all day, once in a while I need to be mobile, but it’s much easier to work on one machine vs two.

> The machine is mine and I do work on it.

> My employer doesn’t dictate how I get things done and paid for the machine I want.

That is very much not your machine. If your employer ever gets sued, or runs into some investigation, or some internal dispute escalates enough, all the data on it is now likely available for them for review.

Given large enough company and enough people, you'll get that "preserve documents for discovery" email one day. It happens outside of the US too.

To be clear sms sucks on iPhones also. iMessage is also better then sms though.

I've never really understood what people mean by this. For me, iMessage is indistinguishable from SMS, except for the color of the messages, and the fact that I can use iMessage over WiFi.

Being able to use it without a mobile network seems pretty distinguishable. As well as not being subject to international charges.

And then of course the vastly higher fidelity of pictures and video sent via iMessage.

It's easy for me to forget how different my circumstances are from most other people. I'm far more likely to be in a place where I have no WiFi than a place where I have no cell service. And I don't personally know anyone outside the US, so I don't send international messages. I guess I've never paid enough attention to the fidelity of pictures I'm sent or am sending over SMS to notice a quality difference.

Group messages.

If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group and receive replies to the whole group.

(P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited exposure to iMessage's feature-set).

That used to be my experience years ago, but now whether I use android or iphone, I see the whole group.

> If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

Does MMS not exist in your country?

It does, but is priced uncompetitively compared to mobile data.

Interesting. Here in the US, plans that don't include unlimited talk+text are hard to find, even among the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for at least a decade.

I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.

Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message.

That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative.

Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic.

Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.

Dang, that's some highway robbery pricing right there.

Here in the US its common to have at least 1MB MMS max size. Back in the day 300-600KB was often the max size, but that's definitely changed over the years. Maybe its just splitting it up and re-assembling it behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

I can't speak for all history, but from about 2004 or so in the US MMS and SMS were often bundled and billed the same, especially for networks which had rolled out 3G/EV-DO. Having a plan with 500 messages usually meant 500 combined SMS and MMS message.

Using it over WiFi is big feature alone for a lot of people who are often in spaces with good WiFi but poor cellular reception. Some carriers support SMS over WiFi in the same way they do "WiFi calling" which can alleviate that.

The other major feature I see for other messengers over SMS/MMS is much larger attachment sizes. It can be challenging sending an MMS with attachments >1MB. Meanwhile, I can send a 100MB file/video or an 8MB photo over Signal. WhatsApp allows for 16MB attachments. Sending a quick video in-line with the chat thread in MMS is miserable and gives an incredibly trash quality video while most other chat apps you can stick a decent quality 30 seconds or so video without any issue. Photos sent over MMS are usually junk while one could get a decent 4x6+ print off an 8MB photo.

To be fair a slightly better comparison would be MMS, but even then it doesn't compare. It's simply because data is cheap, the app is free, and the rich media features that came before iMessage/RCS existed (voice, photos/video, attachments, group chats, voip/video calling, etc), and because it's multiplatform (ios to android usage is near 50/50 or 60/40 depending on the country)

SMS was historically expensive and today is still worse with regards to features. (Also international texts as others mentioned) And once you have to choose a specific system, why would you use one that's limited to just part of the market? If you want to use a communicator to talk to people, you may as well go with one that's accessible to everyone.

The opposite is more annoying...

Whatsapp works on PC, Mac, Android and iOS

iMessage only works on Apple devices.

The price of built-in text messaging whether SMS or iMessage (or a combination of the two) largely went to zero for most people in the US texting especially other people in the US by the time other apps gained traction. And services like appointment reminders and verification codes pretty much all use SMS in the US--whatever its potential security vulnerabilities.

So I use 2 or 3 other apps for mostly a few international people I know but basically everyone I know just defaults to SMS/iMessage.

I'm not even sure anyone apart from Signal is really sticking to any principles. This system would be annoying to implement, costly to legally manage, and introduce some ops overhead and security exposure. There's way more incentives for WA and iMessage here to oppose it than just protecting their users. But only one is a cool talking point.

Has Meta threatened to boycott? I know Signal has, and now Apple. However my searches for Meta/WhatsApp seem to show that there’s been contention over their introduction of E2E but they haven’t actually threatened to pull out over it.

That said, I’d be very happy to see that they did threaten a boycott as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-...

Meta:

> Some countries have chosen to block it [WhatsApp]: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.

They said they won't comply. UK would have to simply block WhatsApp.

Thanks. Hopefully they continue to stick to their guns.

I keep writing and deleting responses. I am completely baffled. Speechless, really.

You cannot actually believe that meta gives a single solitary fuck about privacy?

For me at least, it is the opposite. It is not that I think Facebook is principled, it is that I don't think Apple is particularly principled. They care about money. Unlike many of their competitors, they are not fundamentally an ad-tech company which means your personal data has much lower value to them. This has caused them to build their brand around privacy because that is something their competitors have difficulty doing due to their business models. Apple's pro-privacy stance is just as much a capitalistic position as a principled one.

This isn't Reddit, please make higher quality comments.

I think the GP is likely aligned with you anyways.

Interesting. I was going to say that many people use WhatsApp anyways, so if both of them go down that might actually lead to some pushback against these regulations.

Didn't Facebook (now Meta) buy WhatsApp, and it was originally its own thing? I guess you can say Meta kept WhatsApp operational, but I don't necessarily consider it a privacy win for Meta to just buy up some privacy-centric technologies with their billions.

True, but to be fair leading the pack was first Element, with Session, Threema, Viber and Signal.

didn't eta just move to make WhatsApp not end to end encrypted?

Meta was also in the biggest mass surveillance & influence scandal of all times for a private not too long ago, please don't forget

> didn't eta just move to make WhatsApp not end to end encrypted?

If so I missed the memo (that isn't unlikely, I'm not saying you are wrong!). Any references/links for that? A quick search doesn't turn up much, but Google isn't what it used to be…

Opposite, actually. They said they're making Messenger and Instagram Direct e2ee.

In Saudi Arabia and other places, Whatsapp is not encrypted. Otherwise those services would be banned.

This is pure speculation. WhatsApp is banned in some authoritarian countries such as China and UAE. It probably remains unbanned in others simply because it is so important for business.

https://saudi.works/does-whatsapp-work-in-saudi-arabia/

I had to look it up.

Incorrect. WhatsApp is encrypted in all countries.

WhatsApp was a little late to the encryption party

What do you mean? WhatsApp rolled out E2E encryption between 2014 and 2016.

It’s by far the largest messaging service that is e2e encrypted by default. I think it’s more than fair to call it ahead of the curve for a service of its size.

https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/ https://blog.whatsapp.com/end-to-end-encryption

It's a very easy search and might surprise ya.

As recent as 2021, there's been questions: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-...

But, let's go to the start - WhatsApp started in 2011.

Encryption arrived in varying degrees until there was some pressures to change the amount of privacy messages had for advertising purposes.

Lots in the news at the time.

2018 "Another point of disagreement was over WhatsApp’s encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, a security feature that scrambles people’s messages so that outsiders, including WhatsApp’s owners, can’t read them. Facebook executives wanted to make it easier for businesses to use its tools, and WhatsApp executives believed that doing so would require some weakening of its encryption."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/whatsapp-fou...

2018 "Acton said he tried to push Facebook towards an alternative, less privacy hostile business model for WhatsApp — suggesting a metered-user model such as by charging a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up." https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act...

2018 "WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum quits over privacy disagreements with Facebook" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/30/jan-koum-...

2018 WhatsApp co-founder: "I sold my users' privacy" to Facebook "https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-acton-whatsapp-on-faceboo...

Thanks for the links! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that “E2E” doesn’t mean much for a meta service.

Haha, I was considering putting a trigger warning at the start of my post.

Encrypted in transit is not at rest, let alone the backups of messages on Google Drive / iCloud.

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