
Privacy is more popular than ever - kawera
https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-billion-daily-users-privacy-twitter
======
pmontra
I think that the core concept of the article is somewhat misplaced.

What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no cost
and without limits. Then came the better UI, emoticons, group chats and
network effects.

Only few people understand the privacy differences with SMS. Proof: how many
security codes did you verify compared to the number of your active contacts?

About Twitter, its growth is limited not because of privacy concerns but
because everybody understands that it's a public chat. Privacy is not even in
the equation, nobody expects it so nobody is concerned about it. It's really
down to the I don't have anything to say in public thing. People have a lot to
say to friends but little to strangers. Not everybody is a blogger or has to
send press releases, and even them, maybe only in their working persona.

To recap. Not only it's comparing apples to oranges (the post acknowledge
that) but privacy is not a factor in both IMs and Twitter, unless you think
that parents' advice "do not talk to strangers" is about privacy.

~~~
pessimizer
> What used to sell WhatsApp and other IMs wasn't privacy, it was SMS at no
> cost and without limits.

I disagree. I'm pretty sure having to pay extra for SMS and limits on the
number of messages were things of the distant past before WhatsApp started.

~~~
1_player
Not sure where you're located but here in the UK (or Italy) SMS are not free,
unless you have a mobile plan and/or you're texting someone on the same
network. Good luck if you're texting someone in another country.

That's why (almost) everybody in Europe uses WhatsApp. I use SMS _only_ to
receive 2FA codes.

~~~
sametmax
Not in France. SMS are free and unlimited on all providers, across all
providers.

~~~
rotorblade
"free" is a bit misleading, imo. If you _pay_ for a monthly subscription,
then... yes, but really no (although this might be beside the point you make).
And Pay-as-you-go cards are also a thing, where it is certainly not true
(although such cards have been made borderline completely useless with the new
idiotically formulated 'roaming free' EU rules).

~~~
Markoff
why are prepaid cards useless thanks to roaming? i don't see relation there, i
use prepaid card and i am lot in roaming

~~~
rotorblade
They added a clause in the law in which the service providers are allowed to
sell prepaid cards with roaming disabled completely. Several (in Sweden all
but one, France at least the one I'm using) service providers chose this
option for their prepaid.

The why is quite obvious, instead of upping the price on the per-minute/-sms
charges on prepaid, they disabled it to force you to buy a monthly
subscription instead. For me, this means that my phone does not work anywhere
in EU anymore except Sweden and France (and I have two SIMs) unless I increase
my phone spending with about 2000% (yes, I do not use my phone much), I cannot
change the contracts because I cannot live in two countries at once [#], and
will most likely lose the number I have had for over 20 years.

Even so, if I change to a monthly subscription they are allowed to cancel my
contract if I "misuse" the new roaming rules, which I will because I want to
keep my Swedish number but I will not live there for several more years (at
least).

The new roaming rules only helps tourists (although I believe that the monthly
fees have gone up all over EU since the transition to "roaming free" rules, so
only the service providers are gaining anything on the transition). For people
who have to be mobile across the EU it is a total nightmare. This has made me
very angry (perhaps unproportionately so), and it is my opinion that the EU
MPs that put forth this law should be ashamed and this is a complete failure.

[#] I can change it in France, since I live here, but I'm moving away from
here soon, so why bother, but not to Sweden. So I have to break some country's
law by saying I move back to Sweden when I don't, change my contract, move to
where I actually am, and then lose my number anyway at 1000% the cost of my
old card. And when I move, since this is not to France nor Sweden, but still
in the EU, my phone will not work at all moving there! All things you have to
do when moving to a new country I have to manage without a phone now.

~~~
Markoff
OK, never heard about this, prepaid cards from my and other neighboring
countries works in roaming same as postpaid plans.

------
CM30
Hmm, not sure these examples make much sense here. Yes Twitter is losing
popularity and WhatsApp is gaining it, but remember that:

1\. For most people, WhatsApp's key draw isn't privacy or encryption, it's a
convenient way of messaging people for free. It's replaced standard text
messaging for many of them, and IM clients for others. Similarly, Twitter may
be mostly public, but that's not really why people might not be using it so
much any more. Instead, I'd blame its continually worsening reputation
(associated with mobs, doxing and people getting attacked for 'wrongthink'),
general decline in quality due to recent political events taking over
everything and poor management that doesn't understand what its users really
want from the service.

The fact these services can be used to represent 'privacy' or a lack of it is
a nice coincidence.

2\. The two services aren't really direct competitors. People don't use
WhatsApp to replace Twitter or vice versa. It could be more useful to look up
what those WhatsApp users were using before switching to the app, and figuring
out where Twitter users go after they leave.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
They really weren't comparing apples to oranges?

------
idlewords
It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private
communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the
message metadata and linking your WhatsApp use to your Facebook account.

But what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private
conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more
social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by
a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites
like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair
amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public,
but not have their words live in perpetuity.

What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate
securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies
and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are
invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have
casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.

~~~
Spivak
WhatsApp is really the first E2E messaging app that you can actually get your
friends to use because it's blazing fast, the UI is friendly, and the E2E is
99% transparent.

You don't actually have to verify the signatures in WhatsApp assuming that at
some point you believe you're talking to the right person which can be gleaned
a million different ways. Then you can/should be suspicious if it changes.

~~~
petre
It needs access to your contacts list, something I am not willing to grant it,
given that it's owned by Facebook. Otherwise it doesn't work. Singal and Wire
work regardless.

------
euske
Offtopic, but I wonder what happened to their "no Adblock plz" policy. I can
read the site without a problem now.

~~~
JonRB
It may potentially have proven to be completely ineffective at getting people
to turn off their adblockers.

------
pgeorgep
Can't really compare Twitter to WhatsApp since they are in entirely different
categories of apps. Twitter is a social network, and WhatsApp is a messenger.

None the less, privacy deserves to be more popular than ever.

------
aphextron
I've been wondering lately how feasible it would be to build an e2e encrypted
social networking service. Just give people a completely secure place to store
their photos, build a network of friends, message people, and promote social
events without having their data mined for advertisements and government
subpoenas.

~~~
SirensOfTitan
I think some significant breakthroughs need to happen re: homomorphic
encryption for this to be feasible at all. Search, recommendations, and
integration all would be significantly degraded otherwise compared to
something like Facebook.

------
robobro
"Privacy isn't dead," with no mention of the highly relevant Wikileaks "Vault
7" campaign... hahaha.

