SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
Signal will soon be your one stop solution for all your chat apps
Fixed that for you.
* Except SMS
especially SMS
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No it won’t.
My sister was angered when I quit whatsapp (and facebook), asking me reasons why and if it was because I didn’t like her. Told her I like my privacy. Haven’t heard of her and a lot of other family since who only like to communicate through social media. Good.
I like SMS and Signal, only people that care for me are using that because I asked them to.
I’m there with you on the ideals, after all here I am on Lemmy (and mastodon fwiw) with Reddit and TwitterX deleted.
But, everybody I am close to in everyday life is a normie for lack of a better term. I don’t have to use Facebook regularly, for example, but there is a practical value to just having it available and checking notifications from time to time.
Kind of like how I’m looking through some code in Linux at work today, but it’s running in a VM on my Microsoft/O365 equipped PC. Much like with Facebook, factors outside my control necessitate using it, so I accept it without stressing myself.
I’m not trying to argue or convince you to change your ways though! FLOSS and privacy need awareness and advocacy, and therefore need strong outspoken supporters!
only people that care for me are using that because I asked them to.
That logic works both ways. You don’t care about them enough to use WhatsApp/Facebook it seems to me.
WhatsApp can eat a crap
I won’t use it either
Chad move
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Sad chad
The fact that iMessage got the exemptions underpins the entire act. I would any day switch to Signal, if there is 1:1 interoperability b/w the platforms.
@TheMadnessKing @floppy in Europe for most people iMessage is just the SMS app. Even though it pisses me off that Apple got away with it, having WhatsApp to comply with this is just huge. Everyone here uses WhatsApp, and now I won’t be forced to leave Signal anymore.
iMessage is not considered a gatekeeper in Europe because pretty much nobody uses it. That’s why it’s extempted.
Here people use it as a better SMS. Group chats are all on Discord for my generation and the older generations primarily use FB messenger I believe.
Apple just claimed an exception. It’s still up to the EU to determine whether it is actually exempt or not.
I’m sure I read that they got the exemption approved.
Nobody here uses it though
Yes. Thankfully.
It’s because there’s not enough people in the EU actually using it.
It’s really on American regulators to hold American companies accountable if they abuse their dominant position in the American market to the detriment of American consumers.
They got a exception because npbody uses that insecure garbage here, everyone uses Whatsapp tho so this makes a lot of sense!
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Cool so I can decide to use Signal for privacy reasons and if the other party uses WhatsApp all my chats with them are read by Meta? What is the point?
No, it’s still E2EE. Meta can’t read it as far as anyone knows. Meta will know that the other person has you in their contacts (they already know this) and that they are messaging you, that’s it.
Meta writes the software that runs on the other end, and it’s closed source. Therefore for all we know, the message is end-to-end encrypted, and the moment it is decrypted on the other end Meta can send it back to their servers or use it for advertising. Unless the client at the end is open source and audited, E2E doesn’t mean much imo
Well, I think you’re the only one who thinks that E2EE doesn’t mean much.
No I think you’ve missed their point. E2EE is end-to-end encryption, as in the message can’t be intercepted in the middle but it’s unencrypted at the end so you can read it. Because the WhatsApp app is closed-source you don’t know that it doesn’t immediately read the message and send the content to Facebook. It probably doesn’t, but it could! E2EE itself means that some third party can’t read your message in transit, though to be fair closed-source again means we just have to trust Facebook when they say WhatsApp uses E2EE.
I did get their point and what I’m saying is that back doors like this are discussed all the time and as of now, there’s no proof that they exist. To the contrary, we have information confirming that content of E2E encrypted messages is not available to government agencies. Claiming otherwise without proof is simply spreading disinformation.
If somebody hands me a black box, tells me what’s inside, how is the burden of proof on me? I have to trust them blindly until somebody proves that there is something bad in the black box? No, I ask for a transparent box in the first place.
WhatsApp being a black box means we don’t know how it’s doing things but we can still know a lot about what it’s doing and what it’s not doing. For example we know it has permissions to access all the contacts and we know when it’s accessing device location data. We also know from FBI documents that they can’t access content of E2EE messages or how much data it’s transmitting and when. It would be hard for Meta to transmit all received messages to their servers without anyone noticing. It’s good you prefer OSS but it doesn’t mean you can make wild claims about some security flaws like that.
That’s not it. It’s E2EE but Meta gathers all the metadata from Whatsapp including who you contact, when, where, how large the messages are, what times you’re online and for how long, phone numbers, names etc. That’s plenty of info to create a profile on users and their connections with each other, as is Facebook’s MO.
That’s exactly what I said. They will have meta data but will not be able to read chats. What are you disagreeing with?
What is the point?
The point is that you are not using Whatsapp to talk to them. Which is inherently an improvement since they only get one sided metadata.
Whatsapp encrypts top and it’s your choice to write with someone on Whatsapp… 🤦
The point is that people can switch their apps one by one, not losing any contacts in the way, instead of trying to convience all your friends to install new app at once.
You can install both apps and transition one friend at a time
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Not a fucking chance!
I setup my own matrix instance and ran a few bridges on it, so I don’t need WhatsApp thanks
How does that solve communication with people that are exclusively on whatsapp?
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I never used matrix or bridges so I don’t know what that means. Do you still need a whatsapp account? What do people using whatsapp see when you send messages to them? How does encryption work if you bridge something like signal, if there are “bridges” for other apps out there? Can i bridge viber on my phone and avoid the annoying ads that way, how reliable is it?
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You login to your account with the bridge, so the bridge can pretend to be you.
I’ve been reading a bit about it, it sounds good in theory but I’m not sure most people are willing to selfhost (since otherwise you’re just trusting another party with your data anyway) and maintain all these bridges for something as crucial as day to day communication that should be stable. It kinda wraps it all in a single point of failure as well.
Still seems like the EU legislation could be a better option, if I can just interface with everything through signal or telegram.
Matrix is FOSS, Synapse (Matrix server) is FOSS, bridges are FOSS. The only thing stopping most people is a server that can run 24/7
This is the way
Bridges?
You can set up bridges to link to your other messengers. Then you will only need Matrix to be able to reply to everyone.
How
But you still need an account and the bridge does not use official API.
Eww no get that trash outta here
And this is where I wonder, how long until Matrix servers preemptively defederate from WhatsApp?
Probably won’t. WhatsApp is already huge. Threads was a new platform with artificially inflated user numbers.
Why though? To avoid users leaving Signal for Whatsapp? if you need to chat with someone through matrix into whatsapp, right now you laready have whatsapp installed. I prefer to talk to whatsapp users from a more secure app, thanks.
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I can assure you, it won’t for me. The only people I ever see using it IRL are meth heads and prostitutes lol
You run with an interesting crowd.
Whatsapp? What year is this? 2015?
edit: get some real problems yall
WhatsApp is easily the most used chat app outside the US and has never gone away. I live in South America and it’s HUGE here, specially since IPhones didn’t caught on down here, so we don’t use whatever app the US public uses.
Man I wish I could live in the no iPhone world.
The US public largely uses SMS still.
You never heard about the WhatsApp Empire?
whatsapp is huuuge in India too, literally default messasing and calling app
@el_bhm @floppy you americans are making a fool of yourselves in these threads, there are tons of comments about whatsapp being old or only for drug dealers & sex workers, and it’s so funny how out of touch with the world outside of your borders y’all are. In basically any other place of the world; universal messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram, or WeChat are the de facto standard.
Does anyone know what level of interoperability is required? Like basic text, pictures, emoji… or every feature including things like location sharing?
Full Unicode text and images is likely all we’ll get, but honestly I never understood the appeal of all the crap they stuff into (say) iMessage.
I don’t know iMessage, but some of the more advanced features in WhatsApp/Messenger are great. I use shared location almost daily, voice messages are great too.
Good question. Because it could end up like the interoperability of MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger of the early 2000’s. It was crap.
I have a whatsapp because my dad wanted to be able to call me without international long distance fees. He’s called once and I get endless amounts of spam. I’ll be seeing him in a couple of weeks, and I can hopefully switch him to LINE (what everyone uses here) and get rid of this app for all and get the last cancer of Meta out of my personal life.
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Really? I’ve gotten almost no spam in the last decade or so I’ve been using it. The one time I did, I think the account had been hacked.
Back at you with whatsapp too. I still dislike it but not because it generates spam, at all. Do you mean that you get messaged by spammers though whatsapp? I only use it to chat with family memebers and I have no issues with notifications or anything. Maybe I have blocked some notifications but you can do it too.
Yeah, I get tons of random messages from people I don’t know. A couple are recruiters who are finding my number on my CV, but most are just “hi sweety, do you have time to talk?” from random numbers all over the world.
Huh, that means that your phone number was sold to call centers. There’s a thing called the robison list in europe, idk if it works worldwide, where if you put your phone number in that list call centers can’t legally call you. I’ve recieved zero spam since I put my number in that list, but it seems surprising that recruiters are contacting you through Whatsapp instead of calling you, emailing you or just sending you a message through LinkedIn, that’s seems excessively aggressive.
Damn, I don’t really have a solution besides marking them all as spam, but new numbers will keep coming so idk if there is a good solution, sadly. Just a note though, if you are receiving that much spam through whatsapp is noe because it’s whatsapp specifically, it’s because it’s the most used app in europe and spammers try to contact numbers from their list though the common apps by default.
WhatsApp is fundamentally bad and anti-consumer because it is proprietary. When people are not allowed to understand, change and redistribute the source code, the people will ALWAYS be milked and abused in some way. Trust me. LINE is also closed source and unfree, so it would only be a matter of time until that company fucks you up and you want to switch to another messenger. The most popular open source/ free messenger would be Signal. Conceptually the most promising one in my opinion is SimpleX Chat, if you want to be a bit more adventurous
No one I know is going to change to those. LINE also has other business stuff built in for interacting with companies (customer service for my massage place, my dentist, etc.) In an ideal world, sure, but it isn’t going to happen.
I have a similar issue but I am able to use SMS for those few people, most of them are relatively easy to convince of Singla in my experience, it’s as easy as it gets, basically whatsapp in secure!
wrong
