Whats app new privacy terms Feb 8th agree or leave.

[KingofKong]

All the tin foil hatters, nonces, villains and terrorists will need to find another way of communicating, although I think most already do.

Back in the real world, meh, who cares?

Got nothing to hide, got nothing to worry about.

[camel_landy]

RizzoTheRat said:

camel_landy said:

RizzoTheRat said:

Surely a huge amount of people are using the Facebook app on their phone (over 5 Bn downloads on Google Play ), in which case they already have access to photos and location, and probably address book (not sure how that ties in with FB contacts)

...and that's a good thing?

Probably not, but is the WhatsApp data sharing going to give FB any more information than they already have? ie if people use the FB app and aren't bothered about the data being harvested, is there any reason for them to worry about the new Whatsapp T&Cs?

Yes... They get more data to play with. Correlation, aggregation, etc... But you're also assuming 1:1 relationship between users having WhatsApp & Facebook accounts.

RizzoTheRat said:

camel_landy said:

RizzoTheRat said:

I tend to use Whatapp Web a fair bit, are there particular issues with that?

You can't use WhatsApp web without the app on your phone and access to cookies.

Does that give them any more data than just having the app on the phone though?

Yes (^^^ See my earlier comment about address books & Cambridge Analytica).

Either way, it's a personal choice. I've made my choice and I'm binning my account.

M

[RizzoTheRat]

camel_landy said:

Yes... They get more data to play with. Correlation, aggregation, etc... But you're also assuming 1:1 relationship between users having WhatsApp & Facebook accounts.

I'm more thinking particular people who have both and are probably fairly unconcerned so won't be easy put off Whatsapp.

[camel_landy]

RizzoTheRat said:

I'm more thinking particular people who have both and are probably fairly unconcerned so won't be easy put off Whatsapp.

The address book on your phone _will_ have more & varied contacts than those you're 'Friends' with on Facebook. Your address book will probably have contacts who are not on Facebook. Your phone can also give a more precise location than Facebook.

Have you read the new T&C?

M

[PurpleTurtle]

joropug said:

I've downloaded Signal and it seems almost a whatsapp clone. (A good thing!!)

That's because Signal was founded by Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp but then fell out with Facebook over their monetization of it after they bought it.

Voluntarily left $850 million in stock options on the table over it. That's some principles!

[Durzel]

I've started using Signal, mainly because several IT literate friends have made the same decision.

I can't see myself getting rid of WhatsApp though, simply because its ubiquitous now and I'm in a number of groups with people who either won't know, won't care or won't understand what this all means.

I'll likely just continue to use Facebook, WhatsApp, etc in the most minimal way, getting reminded about peoples birthdays, etc. I tend to think it's only an issue in terms of what these companies know about you if you live your life like an open wound.

Frankly if you bin off WhatsApp whilst still having Facebook, Instagram, etc then it's a bit of a token gesture. Could also say the same about Google too. And loyalty cards, supermarkets run banks nowadays so they can pretty much know the end-to-end flow of your money.

I also tend to think that the people who rave about this stuff tend to have an inflated view of their own importance or significance. They're just an entry on a database, no one at Facebook, etc actually gives a crap about them personally, no matter how much they'd like to believe they are (whilst complaining about it).

[PurpleTurtle]

toon10 said:

What are the ramifications of these new terms? I use WhatsApp a lot but what information do they have on me beyond my contact information? I'm sure they don't care about my random meme sharing groups and my Call of Duty gaming arrangements with the squad.

All about the Meta Data that WhatsApp wants to share.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/01/03...

Facebook Messenger is the scarier one, if you are inclined to be scared about these things.

[PurpleTurtle]

Durzel said:

I've started using Signal, mainly because several IT literate friends have made the same decision.

I can't see myself getting rid of WhatsApp though, simply because its ubiquitous now and I'm in a number of groups with people who either won't know, won't care or won't understand what this all means.

I'll likely just continue to use Facebook, WhatsApp, etc in the most minimal way, getting reminded about peoples birthdays, etc. I tend to think it's only an issue in terms of what these companies know about you if you live your life like an open wound.

Frankly if you bin off WhatsApp whilst still having Facebook, Instagram, etc then it's a bit of a token gesture. Could also say the same about Google too. And loyalty cards, supermarkets run banks nowadays so they can pretty much know the end-to-end flow of your money.

I also tend to think that the people who rave about this stuff tend to have an inflated view of their own importance or significance. They're just an entry on a database, no one at Facebook, etc actually gives a crap about them personally, no matter how much they'd like to believe they are (whilst complaining about it).

I'm of the same mindset.

I've managed to get my 79yo non-IT literate Mum on WhatsApp, along with a couple of her closest friends. It's the only thing keeping them sane to be able to message each other when they can't see each other, and I've enjoyed sending her some short videos of our son. They provide this for free, so there has to be something in return, the monetization of user data. I'm totally comfortable with that. How much they make about my messaging between a small group of mates about 90's indie bands, football and motorbikes I've no idea but good luck to them.

A mate suggested Signal to me, I added it at the weekend. Of my 500+ contacts, about 30 people are on it. Interesting to see how that changes over times, I suspect not very much.

[Durzel]

PurpleTurtle said:

I'm of the same mindset.

I've managed to get my 79yo non-IT literate Mum on WhatsApp, along with a couple of her closest friends. It's the only thing keeping them sane to be able to message each other when they can't see each other, and I've enjoyed sending her some short videos of our son. They provide this for free, so there has to be something in return, the monetization of user data. I'm totally comfortable with that. How much they make about my messaging between a small group of mates about 90's indie bands, football and motorbikes I've no idea but good luck to them.

A mate suggested Signal to me, I added it at the weekend. Of my 500+ contacts, about 30 people are on it. Interesting to see how that changes over times, I suspect not very much.

Agreed.

I’m sure there’s some quite portentous musings that could be made about the power Facebook has, how the “data behind the data” is so vast, etc, but ultimately I’m struggling to care. Like you, for me its a free service I can use to talk to my mates.

I’m fairly certain that in the grand scheme of things my value to companies is pretty low, and the ones who I would be valuable to are likely to be ones I am or would be interested in engaging with anyway.

If you post absolutely everything about your life, or even if you just post your daily goings on, as I know some people on my feeds do - like a firehose - that next to no one engages with, then yes - these companies would know a lot about you, your whereabouts and even your peccadillos. The obvious solution seems to be not to share everything, but that seems to be an incredible (and impossible) obstacle to some.

[KingofKong]

Signal is great for having private conversations with ladies what you are not supposed to be talking to because you can pin code the chat, but the pin code isn’t the same as the phone unlock code.

[juice]

Ridealong said:

Looks like Telegram is the better option versus Signal and WhatsApp

https://meganvwalker.com/telegram-vs-signal-with-w...

We've also switched to Telegram, I trialed both and preferred Telegram.

[RizzoTheRat]

camel_landy said:

Have you read the new T&C?

Not yet. Trouble is without knowing what FB already knows about me, it's hard to figure out what it changes.
As others here seem to have done I've installed Signal and found it's only my friends who work in IT on it so far, but loads of people I know use WhatApp so it won't be much use unless they move over too.

[i4got]

RizzoTheRat said:

camel_landy said:

Have you read the new T&C?

Not yet. Trouble is without knowing what FB already knows about me, it's hard to figure out what it changes.
As others here seem to have done I've installed Signal and found it's only my friends who work in IT on it so far, but loads of people I know use WhatApp so it won't be much use unless they move over too.

Couple of my WhatsApp groups have migrated to Signal - it's such an easy transition I expect to see most of my regular contact there soon.

[Durzel]

RizzoTheRat said:

Not yet. Trouble is without knowing what FB already knows about me, it's hard to figure out what it changes.
As others here seem to have done I've installed Signal and found it's only my friends who work in IT on it so far, but loads of people I know use WhatApp so it won't be much use unless they move over too.

You can request all of the data Facebook hold on you, from them, via their website. The downside of this is that you’ll probably get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it.

[jshell]

Many friends of mine now migrated to Signal. Working well so far.

[camel_landy]

Durzel said:

I’m fairly certain that in the grand scheme of things my value to companies is pretty low, and the ones who I would be valuable to are likely to be ones I am or would be interested in engaging with anyway.

Do you vote?

You're sounding like someone who can't be arsed to vote because you feel your vote won't make a difference.

Durzel said:

If you post absolutely everything about your life, or even if you just post your daily goings on, as I know some people on my feeds do - like a firehose - that next to no one engages with, then yes - these companies would know a lot about you, your whereabouts and even your peccadillos. The obvious solution seems to be not to share everything, but that seems to be an incredible (and impossible) obstacle to some.

Don't forget it's not just meta data you have but there's also the question of meta data other people might be holding about you in their phones.

M

[camel_landy]

Durzel said:

You can request all of the data Facebook hold on you, from them, via their website. The downside of this is that you’ll probably get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it.

Don't forget there's plenty of info in the cookies too...

M

[Durzel]

camel_landy said:

Durzel said:

I’m fairly certain that in the grand scheme of things my value to companies is pretty low, and the ones who I would be valuable to are likely to be ones I am or would be interested in engaging with anyway.

Do you vote?

You're sounding like someone who can't be arsed to vote because you feel your vote won't make a difference.

I do vote, yes. I get the characterisation you're making here, but I think its a bit of a false equivalency.

My attitude generally with this stuff is quite simple - I benefit personally from using various free services (and yes, I know the whole trite "if the service is free, you're the product"), and the data these companies hold about me and however it is communicated between them, is both opaque to me and uncontrollable, short of not using these services at all.

To use an example - I personally benefit from Google's traffic routing and visualisations, showing me where traffic jams are. I'm aware that this uses anonymised (one would hope) location data, of which I presumably contribute to myself. Should I care that Google might know where I am? I carry around a mobile phone, as most people do, so if I did something extremely dodgy the Police could triangulate me fairly easily anyway, even without GPS. Anyone carrying around a modern mobile phone can be located by authorities with relative ease.

Facebook et al store however much data they have on me, and share it with whoever, all invisibly to me, but as said before - I'm struggling to care. I consciously don't share anything I wouldn't want anyone, even outside of my friends, to know, on any service, so unless they can permeate my brain I feel pretty secure about my level of interaction.

Ultimately though, if people want to "make a stand" about WhatsApp, then they ought to be in the all or nothing camp. Switching off WhatsApp but continuing to use Google, or loyalty cards, or other lo-fi ways of tracking consumption habits, etc is just grandstanding. You can't know to a certainty that any company you deal with, or through - in the case of ISPs - isn't misusing your data, so you either have to forgo all of the benefits these services provide, and live off the grid, or you have to accept that it's not something for nothing, your data is paying for your access which would otherwise cost money to provide.

Edited by Durzel on Tuesday 12th January 15:20

[camel_landy]

Durzel said:

Ultimately though, if people want to "make a stand" about WhatsApp, then they ought to be in the all or nothing camp.

I don't think it needs to be binary but it does need to be informed... And that's where it falls down. I see it all too often where companies rely on slipping through contentious T&Cs, by relying on users blindly clicking through and then signing on the dotted-line.

I don't really care whether you agree with the terms or not, I just want people to understand what they're getting into.

FWIW - I'm not a fan of loyalty cards either.

M

[Corso Marche]

I've Telegram and WhatsApp on my phone. Up until now I'd blocked Telegram from accessing my contacts as it's only used to receive updates and bulletins.
But just now I shrugged my shoulders and gave it access to my contacts. I was surprised to see 40 of my contacts active on Telegram. Unfortunately only 1 out of that 40 is somebody I contact with any frequency.
But that's 40 out of 917 contacts. Everybody is on WhatsApp currently. Dropping it means little when everybody else is on it and you've made yourself harder to reach by removing WhatsApp. It's difficult enough for people to get their heads around the fact I don't use FB or Messenger.