A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I moved back to Spain after 9 years abroad. I discovered this country runs on WhatsApp. Not a chance this will change in the short term.
same in Turkey
No, the network effect is too strong. Deleting WhatsApp is cutting off the primary/only way to contact many friends (in countries where it’s the primary messenger), and a mild form of “abandon everything and go live in a monastery”.
Of course not. They install Facebook that has one ad every two posts, ads in WhatsApp is nothing
I can’t delete something I never installed.
Do people still use meta’s crap? Yep. They won’t stop. They don’t care.
No. Not even I can delete Whatsapp. If you have the phone number of anyone on planet earth, then you can be certain that they can be reached on Whatsapp. In some countries people will not check their SMS app, but will check Whatsapp.
Telling people to contact you using other platforms doesn’t matter, they’ll just text you less often, and will most likely not see your messages, because people tend to clear their notification panel very often, and check the messages they got by opening Whatsapp at some point of the day.
Telegram has been successful in some Asian countries, especially Arabic ones, but still, not comparable to Whatsapp. Even though I prefer signal, I convinced a lot of people to switch to Telegram, just because fuck Facebook (Meta).
I love
enshittificationthe network effect (and also enshittification)Deleting and not using are completely different.
Also most non-American, non-Chinese people are complelty dependent on WhatsApp for messaging so, to answer your question, no. They will neither delete nor stop using.
I hope this will be good:
https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/sup-by-pixelfed-is-coming/
Then I can also get rid of Signal and Skype.
deleted by creator
No. Some will, most won’t.
I think they will if Whatsapp starts pushing full-screen, malicious/video ads which are unskippable. It takes a lot to get people to change, but once you reach a tipping point, people will dump you ASAP. However, Meta is somewhat smart, so I wouldn’t bet against people leaving so fast
Network effect will likely be stronger to the masses than the minority who will be annoyed by the ads enough to leave the platform.
Not exactly up to date on the subject, will there be an option to pay to avoid ads?
We need to realise that WE ARE A MINORITY. Most people do not give a single shit about ads and go about their lives
I keep offering my partner a way out via either a pi hole or (my current setup) adguard. They literally don’t want it. Why? It doesn’t bother them and sometimes you have to watch the ads for perks in games. Even tried to show them that you can have per App rules etc.
But no. It’s not a big deal. Using any of their devices gives me an aneurysm, I keep forgetting how bad mobile ads and browser ads are. Smh
What do you use that allows you to set per app rules?
TrackerControl gives app-level control. It’s FOSS & available on F-droid.
I use adguard. Bought the app years ago and I couldn’t be happier. It’s especially great because some secure apps break with their traffic routed through it and it’s super easy to configure.
I used to have pi-hole setup and a housemate complained that he could no longer click on Google ads 🙄
Just use a custom list for them. Or just isolate them on a different vlan.
Wtf? I weep for humanity.
I’ve actually had useful stuff advertised to me on Facebook, not all ads are bad.
That’s why I don’t play mobile games at all :D
Yes, tech enthusiasts are a minority and most people are tech illiterate.
As someone who works in the tech industry. I can tell you people here are not tech illiterate, but most just dgaf about privacy when they can trade it in for convenience. That’s why most of them are okay with designing apps that have zero respect to user privacy and they see nothing wrong with it.
That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it? Humans are creatures of habit. They have an app all their contacts are on, why should they change apps then? What you can do is sneakily install a different messenger app on your relative’s phones and write them through that.
WhatsApp is where their friends are, and most people don’t realize the benefits of federated communication protocols like XMPP, so they won’t change.