In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups.
There is an expectation that the information you share by someone having your number is very limited - the person that has your number can text you, yes, but they can't know about you, and you can limit the small amount of info you let through like your profile picture or your online state using privacy controls.
This expectation is completely removed when adding somebody's number to your contact list is enough for Facebook to do its magic and reveal the owner in your Facebook friends suggestions.
I've had it happen dozens of times, I start texting a tinder match and suddenly her profile is there in my suggestions. It's common for it to misfire and I end up being suggested the personal account of the owner of a business I bought something for. They don't even need to text you, you add the number to your phone's contact list and it's there.
Facebook needs to be broken apart, and we need a law that the data you share with an app can't be used for others period, even more so if they were separate businesses when you started using the service, and a change of policies is not enough - you might already be locked in.
Stop giving your Facebook apps access to your contacts. Newly added contacts were also showing up as suggestions in Facebook and Instagram until I turned this off. iOS and Android give you all the control you need to stop this from happening you just have to use it.
Same in mine, but instead of WhatsApp it is Rakuten Viber, which is massively popular in Eastern Europe. Beats me why, I don't like it that much and don't have a slightest idea about what are they doing with our data. But it became an issue trying to communicate without it. I'm a WhatsApp user from the early days, and I'm still dreaming about a day WhatsApp will be "independent" again.
I am trying to get rid of WhatsApp. My strategy for this is: Use iMessage with friends in the Apple world. Convince the Android folks to start using Signal. Has been quite successful so far.
This has never happened to me, probably because I don't install the Facebook app and don't give Messenger Lite access to my contacts. If Facebook and Whatsapp were sharing phone numbers or metadata behind the scenes I would expect to see a lot of suggestions when I log in to the Facebook website, but I don't.
Still agree with your opinion, though. Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts.
My suggestion would be to not connect any Facebook services. I have an old school FB.com account, an Instagram and a WhatsApp. All three of these accounts are not aware of one another. I'm sure FB probably still has ways of figuring this out but it gets you pretty far in mitigating the infomation flow between various FB products.
Why are you still using their products? From your comment you seem pretty passionate about this issue.
From economics there is the concept of "revealed preference", your individual subjective preferences are revealed by the choices you make. In this case, we can observe that Facebook's subjectively bad qualities are enough to demand politicians Do Something, but not enough to suffer the inconveniences of using a different chat app, etc.
The sad irony is that these points of concern are also potential advantages for competing platforms (e.g., Signal), and by regulating them away, Facebook/Whatsapp become further entrenched.
> When Facebook notified the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, it informed the Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook users' accounts and WhatsApp users' accounts. It stated this both in the notification form and in a reply to a request of information from the Commission. However, in August 2016, WhatsApp announced updates to its terms of service and privacy policy, including the possibility of linking WhatsApp users' phone numbers with Facebook users' identities.
I may be misunderstanding this legalese vocabulary but doesn't "unable" mean "technically incapable"? As in, there's no technical way of matching users?
Because if so, man, whoever wrote this must have laughed a lot when they wrote it. You may not be able to match 100% of users of course, but with the amount of personal data FB has access to it should be able to match a good chunk of the userbase with a high degree of confidence if it wanted to.
"Unable" is an interesting word. Does that mean they would never allow the possibility by policy, or that they could not at that time do it, but they have the option to enable it technically in the future?
I think this is what Facebook got fined for earlier, right? (With the caveat that it did not lead to a reversal of the regulatory approval of the merger, because it was not contingent on this.)
I've deleted my WhatsApp account 2 months ago even though I also live in a country where WhatsApp is mandatory.
How am I doing so far:
* I miss a lot of work stuff even though some update me on the important stuff through Signal.
* I lost contact with friends I can't communicate with anymore.
* I feel that I have more free time to focus on my family and close friends. Probably because my neighbors can't sneak into my head with things that don't really effect me.
* The frequency I check my phone dropped by 80%.
* Since I closed my instagram account and Facebook acount 8 years ago, I am now "Zuckerberg free".
I signed up for facebook again a few days ago because I need an account to manage some events / pages whose target demo is still reachable on the platform.
My account was dead for about two years or so before that. Within a minute or two of signing up with my (real) email and phone number, basically my whole friend list from back when I had an account, people I've texted on whatsapp once years ago, etc. were in friend suggestions. Downright creepy.
I didn't even have a Facebook account until about 7 years ago.
I finally made one and I had neatly sorted real life friends as part of my friends suggestion.
That's when I realized they already had a shadow profile of me from everyone else, all I did was activate it and increase their confidence level from 95% or something to 100%...
In a way, I see utility in companies like Facebook openly exploiting whats possible with current technologies, web APIs, and mobile platforms so that privacy laws have a target of what to address and so that the general public can get a grasp of what's going on. It's better than it happening in the dark, behind the scences.
Before Facebook, if you tried to explain to a layman that your social data can be used to manipulate entire elections, people probably would have looked at you with strange and furrowed brows. Now, it's a question of the best way to address the issue.
What annoys me to no end is that I was Whatsapping with a local restaurant for food delivery during the lockdown and two days later, the owner pops up in my Facebook "suggested friends" list.
Why can't comments on Hacker news follow etiquette of staying on topic?
People here respond to the top comment directly with a point that's not even closely related to the top comment. And then everyone else follows.
If you're making a new point that's not gaining from the chained comments feature or directly conversing/adding on to the person above you, just create a new comment.
Once again - Signal[0] as an alternative. It's fully Open-Source (including the backend) and their crypto is public and independently verified[1][2][3]...
Signal is not good enough either in the long run, because of its centralization.
End-to-end encryption is sold as a bulletproof privacy solution, it might solve the most important element of privacy (having your messages not readable by others), in the end they have metadata stored in their end, your social graph, when you are online/offline etc. (there are others things i am sure)
So giving your trust to another party just because they look “promising” does not work. Centralization is the source of all Evil.
Didn't Facebook legally state they will NOT do this when acquiring WhatsApp- to me it sounds as this can be prohibited and daily fines with subsequent breakup should be in order.
I only remember the founders publicly promising that WhatsApp won’t be absorbed into Facebook or something like that. I don’t know if they also put it in the legal documents.
This is a tricky problem and there are a few solutions, none of which are perfect. By far the best one if you can manage it is to delete your facebook account and apps and never look back. Encourage whatsapp contacts to move to signal is probably just annoying for you and them but it seems to be steadily happening, so make sure you have a signal account.
I've been resisting the Facebook (including WhatsApp) monopoly but at personal cost so I'm starting to capitulate. The network effect has been discussed at length already, but imagine if the phone system was controlled by a single company and you could only call customers of the same company!
For those living in the EU and UK (where GDPR still applies), has anyone had success with an Article 21 "right to object" request? For example, objecting to the sharing of data with Facebook when using WhatsApp. It is not an absolute right, it's supposed to be depending on individual circumstances so I expect there's lots of wiggle room for their DPO/legal team to refuse, or just stonewall. I'd love to be wrong, so please share...
> has anyone had success with an Article 21 "right to object" request
Facebook breaches the GDPR when it comes to data subject access requests and appears to get away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ so Article 21 is likely to have the same outcome. Facebook (and other companies) also breach the GDPR with their non-compliant consent prompts (where you can't actually decline) when visiting their websites and also get away with it.
I have an empty Facebook profile and use Whatsapp all the time.
The friend suggestions on Facebook that I get are complete strangers.
I don't know how this works but none of my Whatsapp contacts ever appear as suggestions and none of the suggestions are people I ever knew.
In my case the only annoying thing is when male friends ask me in person if I have an Instagram account, it may have pooped as a recommendation because of this, and I categorically deny it... they obviously know that it's just for the thirst, but I deny it nonetheless.
I think Instagram has an option to not show your number and not to appear in recommendations, but I'm sure it doesn't work.
"promoting safety, security and integrity across the Facebook Company Products, e.g., security systems and fighting spam, threads, abuse, or infringement activities;"
This particular one is very open ended. Facebook's internal security team and it's external contractors have internal tools that use Facebooks App on people's phones to locate, block and alert if marked individuals are near company premises or high ranking executives.
Let's say you protest against Facebook outside their offices, they could look you up on Facebook, find your account and if you enter a zone near their office it will send them an alert. Similarly someone with access to the system can ping your phone anywhere in the world to find a location with only the very basic controls present to prevent it from happening. No doubt the internal teams expand that to include key executives, suppliers etc.
In theory they should be logged in to their own account to do this and not able to ping people in their immediate circles, in reality no doubt they could probably have a false account to bypass this. If you think about the power of this. Hundreds of people with limited oversight free to ping whomever they want as long as they can create a loose reason to do it. Remember when the Saudis were paying people with insider access at Twitter, you could imagine how much the ability of people to ping a FB user anywhere in the world is worth. Two billion users...The NSA can only dream of such access. From intelligence targets to lovers to competitors, hundreds of people have access to this data because of FB policies and tech.
At least with FB you don't have to have the app on the phone. WhatsApp is however essentially the new SMS, it's impossible not to avoid it...and now slowly slowly FB is retaking control.
No wonder Brian Acton has gone to Signal. The original vision of WhatsApp is rapidly being eroded by FB. Yes WhatsApp has e2e but slowly FB is being FB and looking for return on its investment.
How does it affect someone if they don't have Facebook account or even have the FB app installed? (i.e. someone using just WhatsApp.) Does FB still get my data via WhatsApp?
[+] [-] kace91|5 years ago|reply
In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups.
There is an expectation that the information you share by someone having your number is very limited - the person that has your number can text you, yes, but they can't know about you, and you can limit the small amount of info you let through like your profile picture or your online state using privacy controls.
This expectation is completely removed when adding somebody's number to your contact list is enough for Facebook to do its magic and reveal the owner in your Facebook friends suggestions.
I've had it happen dozens of times, I start texting a tinder match and suddenly her profile is there in my suggestions. It's common for it to misfire and I end up being suggested the personal account of the owner of a business I bought something for. They don't even need to text you, you add the number to your phone's contact list and it's there.
Facebook needs to be broken apart, and we need a law that the data you share with an app can't be used for others period, even more so if they were separate businesses when you started using the service, and a change of policies is not enough - you might already be locked in.
[+] [-] Drew_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salex89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raziel2p|5 years ago|reply
Still agree with your opinion, though. Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _lbaq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamgopal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saargrin|5 years ago|reply
and we also got very high presence of Truecaller so basically if you expose your phone number anybody can find your real name and FB profile
[+] [-] unixhero|5 years ago|reply
Ah, Brazil.
[+] [-] tw25656993|5 years ago|reply
From economics there is the concept of "revealed preference", your individual subjective preferences are revealed by the choices you make. In this case, we can observe that Facebook's subjectively bad qualities are enough to demand politicians Do Something, but not enough to suffer the inconveniences of using a different chat app, etc.
The sad irony is that these points of concern are also potential advantages for competing platforms (e.g., Signal), and by regulating them away, Facebook/Whatsapp become further entrenched.
[+] [-] hadrien01|5 years ago|reply
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
Because if so, man, whoever wrote this must have laughed a lot when they wrote it. You may not be able to match 100% of users of course, but with the amount of personal data FB has access to it should be able to match a good chunk of the userbase with a high degree of confidence if it wanted to.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doubleorseven|5 years ago|reply
How am I doing so far: * I miss a lot of work stuff even though some update me on the important stuff through Signal. * I lost contact with friends I can't communicate with anymore. * I feel that I have more free time to focus on my family and close friends. Probably because my neighbors can't sneak into my head with things that don't really effect me. * The frequency I check my phone dropped by 80%. * Since I closed my instagram account and Facebook acount 8 years ago, I am now "Zuckerberg free".
It's hard but It's Worth it.
[+] [-] bschne|5 years ago|reply
My account was dead for about two years or so before that. Within a minute or two of signing up with my (real) email and phone number, basically my whole friend list from back when I had an account, people I've texted on whatsapp once years ago, etc. were in friend suggestions. Downright creepy.
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
I finally made one and I had neatly sorted real life friends as part of my friends suggestion.
That's when I realized they already had a shadow profile of me from everyone else, all I did was activate it and increase their confidence level from 95% or something to 100%...
[+] [-] dimitrios1|5 years ago|reply
Before Facebook, if you tried to explain to a layman that your social data can be used to manipulate entire elections, people probably would have looked at you with strange and furrowed brows. Now, it's a question of the best way to address the issue.
[+] [-] bzb6|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtsiskin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DisjointedHunt|5 years ago|reply
People here respond to the top comment directly with a point that's not even closely related to the top comment. And then everyone else follows.
If you're making a new point that's not gaining from the chained comments feature or directly conversing/adding on to the person above you, just create a new comment.
[+] [-] utf_8x|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://signal.org/en/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p...
[2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog...
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
[+] [-] nalekberov|5 years ago|reply
End-to-end encryption is sold as a bulletproof privacy solution, it might solve the most important element of privacy (having your messages not readable by others), in the end they have metadata stored in their end, your social graph, when you are online/offline etc. (there are others things i am sure)
So giving your trust to another party just because they look “promising” does not work. Centralization is the source of all Evil.
[+] [-] kerng|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes I wish I had studied law...
[+] [-] asiando|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harry8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tolbish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timvisee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jraby3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfz|5 years ago|reply
For those living in the EU and UK (where GDPR still applies), has anyone had success with an Article 21 "right to object" request? For example, objecting to the sharing of data with Facebook when using WhatsApp. It is not an absolute right, it's supposed to be depending on individual circumstances so I expect there's lots of wiggle room for their DPO/legal team to refuse, or just stonewall. I'd love to be wrong, so please share...
[+] [-] Nextgrid|5 years ago|reply
Facebook breaches the GDPR when it comes to data subject access requests and appears to get away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ so Article 21 is likely to have the same outcome. Facebook (and other companies) also breach the GDPR with their non-compliant consent prompts (where you can't actually decline) when visiting their websites and also get away with it.
[+] [-] orange_tee|5 years ago|reply
I don't know how I managed this.
[+] [-] Strs2FillMyDrms|5 years ago|reply
I think Instagram has an option to not show your number and not to appear in recommendations, but I'm sure it doesn't work.
[+] [-] niqmk|5 years ago|reply
Welcome to facebook ads
[+] [-] secfirstmd|5 years ago|reply
This particular one is very open ended. Facebook's internal security team and it's external contractors have internal tools that use Facebooks App on people's phones to locate, block and alert if marked individuals are near company premises or high ranking executives.
Let's say you protest against Facebook outside their offices, they could look you up on Facebook, find your account and if you enter a zone near their office it will send them an alert. Similarly someone with access to the system can ping your phone anywhere in the world to find a location with only the very basic controls present to prevent it from happening. No doubt the internal teams expand that to include key executives, suppliers etc.
In theory they should be logged in to their own account to do this and not able to ping people in their immediate circles, in reality no doubt they could probably have a false account to bypass this. If you think about the power of this. Hundreds of people with limited oversight free to ping whomever they want as long as they can create a loose reason to do it. Remember when the Saudis were paying people with insider access at Twitter, you could imagine how much the ability of people to ping a FB user anywhere in the world is worth. Two billion users...The NSA can only dream of such access. From intelligence targets to lovers to competitors, hundreds of people have access to this data because of FB policies and tech.
At least with FB you don't have to have the app on the phone. WhatsApp is however essentially the new SMS, it's impossible not to avoid it...and now slowly slowly FB is retaking control.
No wonder Brian Acton has gone to Signal. The original vision of WhatsApp is rapidly being eroded by FB. Yes WhatsApp has e2e but slowly FB is being FB and looking for return on its investment.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|5 years ago|reply
It seems more about how WhatsApp/Facebook the company use your data in the background, rather than "how WhatsApp works ...".
[+] [-] blinkingled|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baggachipz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply