I understand that it may be problematic sometimes but this was very smooth. I didn’t even say anything.
A: what’s your number for the whatsapp group Me: I don’t have whatsapp because of facebook. B: ok, we have to use signal then A: ok
And that was it. Life can be very easy sometimes
Surprised that happened. Very rare to see that these days.
Maybe OP works on infosec and the team was like yeah, makes sense?
Let’s say I work in an IT area (but not infosec)
Should have used Matrix
For a team of 20 people matrix is way overkill imo
At first from the title it seemed like they changed app to avoid you
Why don’t you use WhatsApp?
I work in cyber security and this is dogshit.
Most of it debunked thanks to the EU also.
Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.
But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.
I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.
WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.
The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.
Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).
Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.
All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.
Meta owns it, and meta is one of the large, evil tech corps.
They are probably the easiest one for most people from English-speaking countries to cut from their lives.
Because it’s proprietary garbage. If there are FOSS alternatives, I’m most definitely going to use them instead of proprietary software, let alone proprietary software by companies like Meta. And since there are plenty of those alternatives: No WhatsApp for me.
This headline sounds a lot funnier if you assume “it” means Signal, like I did.
Before Signal made the boneheaded move of removing SMS support, it was so much easier for me to pitch the idea of using Signal to my friends and family, most of which eventually did make the shift from SMS to Signal messages for reasons like ease of use when it came to group chats, sending images/videos, voice clips, etc.
But now? Now it’s one of those embarrassing moments where I hear back from people basically all saying "your tech recommendations are usually on point but uh, what happened with Signal???" because the app just abruptly stopped supporting SMS and ruined the seamless appeal. SMS support was the perfect way to ease people into shifting towards Signal messages and now the only damn people I know who still know Signal are my most privacy-minded friends/family, while everyone else has switched back to WhatsApp.
Clearly I’m not bitter…😅 But I mean like, come on. I had the most notorious luddites in my social circle make the switch to Signal and they loved it. The shift from SMS to Signal messages was so smooth so many of them didn’t even have that "I miss [SMS stuff]", plus they LOVED that Signal could be used on their laptops in addition to their phones. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this annoys me so much.
I totally agree. And to make matters worse, one of their arguments was that supporting SMS was taking resources away from developing other features. But what mind blowing features have come out since they dropped SMS? Usernames, I guess, which they were working on anyway. New app icons…
