not a single day goes by without the company taking a crap in some corner.
my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.
> incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
Living in a country where local social networks are more popular with general population than foreign ones (Russia), I'd rather prefer FAANG. "Local companies" may sound good because the word "local" has some nice connotations, like your "local store" or "local coffee shop". But in reality, "local companies" do all the bad stuff that Facebook does, and also go above and beyond to cooperate with the state against the protesters or any political dissidents. And they're also not as good at writing software, so these networks have significantly worse design and a lot more bugs.
There are millions of example where people want to solve a problem, think that they will be able to do it with government regulation, and end up with a situation that is much worse. But even among them, this is a case where it could only make situation worse. And much, much worse.
To "see exactly what's going on", you would need to be sure of what's happening on the server, and I don't know how to do that for sure except for the blockchain.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, let's stick to the better one of the bad choices we have.
You're making a good point. We can, however, write software that makes certain guarantees on the client side. If I'm the only one with the encryption keys, does it really matter what the server does?
This is the basic idea behind zero-knowledge systems using homomorphic encryption to do very cool things.
Or ban it from iPhone for one or two versions so they stop this one tracking. Then repeat often enough that people start thinking it is uncertain that FB/WA be available, and don’t require WA to book a doctor’s appointment.
No, you can’t. If you call them they won’t answer and will just write you on WhatsApp to ask what you wanted. If you SMS, no reply or they will reply on WhatsApp.
One reason is because a lot of phone plans include few or no calls/SMS but include unlimited Whatsapp. When one app is completely ubiquitous in a society and free, people will simply not understand why you want to do something a different way and will often wonder if you’re trying to scam them.
I don't know about Facebook but here in Sweden we have several systems where you need to use Google, and of course accept Google's terms in order to do that.
One example is the health care centers and hospitals that uses Google Maps. Another example being the schools that forces the students to use Chromebooks (and apps like GMail, Google Classroom, Google Docs, etc), and Google forms for requesting information about the kids need for after school care.
I do not like that Google get to know when I need to visit the hospital, or collect information about my children's activities in school. But currently we do not have an option.
It would be pretty infeasible to live in Spain without WhatsApp. Many phone plans here don't include unlimited free SMS and calls, so quite a few folks just don't receive them. Instead they send messages and short voice memos back and forth over WhatsApp.
that's exactly i was hoping for : no answer. <relief>
we 'd be truly screwed if crappy WA would be adamand for such in any given country, even Putinocchio's, Xi's or KJU's. that country 'd be even more crappier than WA, and all FB-associated, which in turn would be quite an achievement on quite a, literally and metaphorically, negative scale in its own right
It occurred to me after posting that there are likely places where healthcare is mostly private companies / practicioners and most would have no enforced accessibility requirements.
my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.