[addicted]

iMessage is “hugely popular” only because it essentially replaces SMS. No one actually goes out of their way to communicate through iMessage.

WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.

[inkyoto]

> WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it […]

… which has become a privacy issue now. If WhatsApp has been granted full access to the contact list, the contacts are passed onto Meta that uses numbers to track users, build out shadow profiles and whatever else they are not telling us about. It can be easily seen, e.g. if you add a new phone number that trickles through into WhatsApp, and if that new person happens to have an Instagram account, their Instagram profile will appear in the Instagram suggestions feed pretty much the next moment.

Meta has been agressively pushy in recent years with its attempt to monetise WhatsApp where they can't glean into the actual messages due to them being encrypted (unlike in Facebook Messenger). So they use the metadata and contacts (phone numbers, email, physical addresses etc) that Meta sells to third-parties, data brokers and businesses including. Messages on WhatsApp from South African, or Malaysian, or similarly remote locations offering jobs (!) or business opportunities are now a fairly regular occurence.

Considering the scale, the reach and popularity, the best option for WhatsApp would be to divest it from Meta (not that they would agree to it), however, the cost of running the platform, plus overall maintenance and feature development would be a substantial expenditure that has to be somehow funded since WhatsApp users will never agree to pay for WhatsApp, and many (who comprise a substantial to very large cohort) will not be able to afford paying for it.

[seec]

But any other app that would get big enough would end up just like that. All those behaviors are just what happens when power gets concentrated (in a single company/group/hand, whatever the case may be).

So, what is actually needed is an interoperable standard so that people have choices to go and leave as they please depending on the behavior of the developers/companies.

Which is exactly what is being done, so that's convenient.

Now I wish we could legislate a way to make a new standard for email and allow people to run it from their home (just like personal mailbox) to remove that power from big tech. The technical solution is probably not that hard but getting adoption without some sort of leverage is almost impossible...