I get why one would feel this way if this was one of Meta’s social media apps, but WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging apps used in so many countries and perhaps also helped kill the telecoms companies paid sms plans to force cheaper sms msging rates, if anything WhatsApp is perhaps the best value Meta has provided to the world, bringing the world closer.

Except that was all done before meta bought it.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...

But getting bought by facebook was the only business plan they ever had, so it was facebook that made all that possible.

Not true. They were doing perfectly fine charging a fair fraction of their 100 mil userbase $1 a month. They sold because founders wanted an exit.

Not true. They were charging 1€ a year, not a month (at least that's the case in my country). The math doesn't add up.

Kinda surprised the parent made such a mistake since Whatsapp was very well known in tech circles for charging an incredibly low fee pre-FB acquisition. And the parent's HN account dates from 2010...

My bad, it was of course per year. Point still stands that $1/year was a viable business model that covered their burn rate and then some.

They probably got initial funding from investors thinking about a future exit. Investors aren't as interested in a company that intends to simply survive on modest profits forever. This is also why startups tend to magically die when big companies aren't doing well.

Inaccurate. They actually tried every remedy to delay/deceive/dissuade this. This is verified in official emails declassified as part of lawsuits.

It wasn't end to end encrypted either before Meta bought it. Maybe it's not all bad?

WhatsApp is a company Meta bought, not brought to the world AFAIK.

It also demands full access to the totality of your contacts to work properly.

An appalling requirement

I always feel I'm in a twilight zone with whatsapp. Am I the only person who doesn't want or need to give the app all of my contacts, or even register with just phone number? Phone number is such an intensely and irrevocably identifiable token and so hard to change, that using it for pervasive messaging seems insane to me :-/

I hate these apps that absolutely need a phone number. I couldn't pay my bill on my cellphone one month, lost the number and now I can't access either my WhatsApp or Telegram accounts.

I've had my phone stolen while traveling, and I can't say how much I despise any system that uses a phone number for authentication.

Go figure, you can't get a SIM card sent to you from the US to Europe, meaning that you potentially lose:

* Access to messenger apps and chat history

* Access to your bank account (with a special nod to Citi)

* Access to your email account if it uses "2FA" with a phone (looking at you, Google)

* etc

Given that my bank cards and laptop were stolen along with the phone, I've had a Very Fun Time™ dealing with all these systems.

You can port your phone number to a voip provider if you will be out of the country for a while. Use a sip phone app, and the "transport layer" sim that you happen to use will have nothing to do with the phone number that is intermingled with your identity.

This is way too much hassle even for me as a techie.

And something tells me short-code SMS receipt (which is what banks use for 2FA) is not going to work well anyway.

If you don't need it, you don't need it. But for the record:

a) Porting your number takes about as much effort as moving between mobile phone providers

b) Setting up a sip app on your phone is trivial (server, username, password) - I'm generally a fan of Acrobits Softphone

c) My voip provider has an sms <> email gateway, so my bank (and other sms based) mfa lands in my gmail inbox

FWIW, Telegram actually handles this pretty well. You just have to have loged in on another device while you still have your phone. You can use that other device to deauth your lost or deactivated phone and auth new logins on other devices.

Sadly I didn't use Telegram for 6 months and when I went to use it I found out they had a 6 month timeout on your login and it basically wipes your stored credentials after 6 months :(

I'm sure you're not the only one, but in a tiny, tiny minority. Using the phone number as the identifier was pretty much the main selling point of Whats App.

I feel the same way but this wariness is amplified by the fact that I don’t trust Meta. Still, I’d be more inclined to sign up to Whatsapp than create a Facebook account; a few real-world friends have said they’d prefer to use Whatsapp over SMS – particularly for sending photos.

Oh, if you're willing to follow its demands, whatsapp is a super smooth experience. All my family uses it.

But the funnel is brutal. Try signing up from anything but a phone, or try not giving it full permissions, etc etc - and you'll have a miserable time. It's a vicious vicious sweet and alluring Black Mirror episode.

>>Am I the only person who doesn't want or need to give the app all of my contacts

No, you are not the only one. I don't understand how sharing contacts with any app is legal under GDPR without getting consent from all contacts

The whole point of contacts is contact information you want to share with apps.

Maybe it would break a lot of things, but my gut instinct is I wish it were illegal for an app to slurp up, even with the user's consent, all of the user's contacts. Any such entries should be manual.

I don't use $SERVICE. I never want to use $SERVICE. I certainly don't consent to $SERVICE having my contact info because some acquaintance/friend/family member who doesn't know any better tapped "allow" on a button. But because it's allowed, any number of immoral companies like Facebook have my info, even though I've made a conscious decision never to use them due to their privacy violations.

Specifically, you need to give it access to your contacts to create contacts on WhatsApp, otherwise you just see phone numbers.

It still boggles my mind that they paid SO much for it

well it is by far the most used messenger app in the world with 2+ billion users so in that sense it seems prescient but i'd agree it's still questionable how they'll monetize it.

Yes but the original founders did that. Zuckerberg took it from them and immediately lied about data sharing, there's a reason why the founders left in disgust

Correction: The founders sold it to Zuckerberg for billions of dollars.

Saying he “took it from them” is outright dishonest.

They sold it under the condition he wouldn't lie, it was a condition for him to have it, and he lied

So why didn’t they take the billions of dollars he paid them and sue to have this “condition” upheld?

One of the co-founders, Brian Acton, has funded most of Signal (~100M USD) in his post WhapsApp life. It is a very hacker mindset solution. Instead of turning to the law to enforce nebulous claims against a megacorp, make a better product with the money you got from said megacorp.

I know "nothing to hide" is never a strong argument but even if Signal is a CIA honeypot, if it keeps my personal conversations from becoming marketing fodder, sign me up!

I'm definitely not a "nothing to hide" guy, but if the CIA wants something on me they're going to find it in 5 minutes. They would only be using a backdoored Signal to get the smart guys; so I guess I have to thank the smart guys for the CIA giving us Signal...

well he took money under the promise and when FB broke the promise, he walked away and left $850M on the table. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/whatsapp-co-founder-walked-aw...

To punish Facebook for breaking their promise, he ... gave Facebook $850M (by not vesting all his equity) ?

Angry people can be irrational. That's my read.

I'll never understand why people don't place value on integrity. I mean day to day people and not stockholders. Zuck controls what happens at Meta, it's not a board decision on stuff like this unless Zuck tells them to do it.

> I’m taking some time off to do things outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches.

It's not a condition if it's not in the contract or if it is and is not acted upon.

In either of those cases it's just lip service.

In an ideal world. In reality it would be a short outage, they'd roll back the DB and patch the exploit in like 10 hours total.

Haha I’d think a better comparison would be (an explosion-free) Fight Club.

Or Mr. Robot attacking E corp.