I don’t disagree but don’t let perfection get in the way of good enough. SMS and standard email etc are all unencrypted. WhatsApp is encrypted end to end. You may not trust meta, or like them. But that’s millions time better than SMS or email.
Getting your parents on WhatsApp is a huge awesome step. Getting them to telegram or Signal or whatever else is a minor step comparatively.
I’m currently in a former USSR country on holiday and everything is WhatsApp and Telegram. Delivery drivers to government services.
Japan is still on floppy disks attached to carrier pigeons.
China is WhatsApp for every non Chinese even with the ban. Wechat for everything else but you need a Chinese mobile.
Korea surprisingly is using WhatsApp more than even prepandemic. Almost all my Korean friends are now WhatsApp versus like 1 just 5 years ago. Telegram is also popping up there.
But point taken. A few bubbles of differences but WhatsApp really does rule supreme.
Pretty much the entire world, except the US and Canada, is WhatsApp based. Every job chat, every message you send, it’s all WhatsApp. Heck to pay for parking or to get immigration visa services from the government, it’s mostly WhatsApp. And yes you can send stickers.
Sometimes Lemmy loses perspective that the way 300ish million people do something is not that relevant to the other 7500 million.
The issue is good luck getting a pay as you go number without identity verification.
You have to pay by credit card and if you don’t, you’ll be forced to make an online account with verification.
The first USB stick I bought, I saved up for and it was over $1/MB. It still works to this day but is so ridiculously slow and capacity limited there’s no reason to.
4TB in a little stamp is amazing.
This already happens. No idea why this is news now.
Utility companies for basically every place in the US give the police the names, addresses, and utility history of all of their top residential users. You have no privacy and no way to stop the pigs from warrantless spying on you.
The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.
This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.
The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.
You activate online usually and have to enter credit card details, addresses, etc. If you use a one time card, and an address that doesn’t match your name on the account you have to make to you in the personal database, then your sim is blocked until verified. Verification is usually sending them images of government issued ID.
The sim can usually access their networks to create the account and verify without using data. Meaning if it truly was your only device, it will allow you unlimited data to use the ISP website.
When was the last time you tried to purchase a burner phone sim in the USA? You can buy them cash only a few places, but are completely useless until “activited” usually with an online account confirming your identity.
Anecdotally, yes. I know that the similarities in profile and avatar photos as well as signature lines on web forums have been used as evidence to link digital profiles together. This linkage then allows warrant level evidence to be used to subpoena the other sites for all user details. Another one that is much harder to hide is writing style. People have a relatively unique way of writing that is often enough to link data. Even when the user name, ip addresses, and everything else is different.
It’s a company that’s model is one I support. If you’re not paying for the service, you are the product. Eventually the free-ness of other solutions will run out. There’s only so much VC money and grant money that doesn’t have alterior motives.
Paying a company to provide a service, which does cost real money to operate, makes me more happy if they abide by their rules.
But it’s a snowball type issue. I’m not going to use Threema if nobody else I need to talk to doesn’t use it. And they aren’t going to use it if nobody else does. WhatsApp has critical mass across the world except USA because iDiots don’t understand. Signal and Telegram have mostly negative awareness due to copaganda telling the general populace that encryption is bad and only shady people use encryption to hide criminal activity. Everything else, (excluding China and their whole different ecosystem) is really just nerd talk between nerds.
I’m intrigued by Threema.
But I have enough trouble getting people to use Telegram and Signal.
In the end, don’t let perfection be the enemy of better than what you have.
For example I use WhatsApp for like 80% of my communication because 80% of them are non-nerds that are barely moving from rawdogging SMS to an encrypted platform. I’d rather use WhatsApp than SMS.
I don’t have any meta accounts and my WhatsApp number is different than my cell number and is registered internationally in a privacy focused country. So to Meta, I’m protected by those rules and any invasion of my data by government forces would need an excuse big enough for international cooperation. Not just the local PD of a podunk town.
You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.
For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.
The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.
To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.
You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.
It’s for location services based off of WiFi and such. Pretty much nothing you can do. You can opt out on your devices on a certain network, but even then if your network broadcasts a signal, it’s being scanned and uploaded.
The only thing you can do is prevent your device from connecting to (or even just scanning for) these networks and signals so that it cannot triangulate. My phones battery saver mode and ultra battery modes do this. Otherwise I have to turn off location services, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. And then why is my phone even on?
Treat your phone like your little spy that you take everywhere with you. Assume it’s always listening and always ratting you out. Operate accordingly.
The data is stored forever. There have been warrants from law enforcement that somehow miraculously turned over deleted information.
Cops are using and abusing the system submitting requests for every case, cold or not. Easiest way to get a name is from a giant private database where everyone has sent in DNA samples…
Yup. It’s all just marketing to idiots.
Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.
Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.
That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.
What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.
My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.
My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.
For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.
If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.
Lol that piece paper is not a god. It’s useless jibberish written by traitors starting a now failed nation.
You have no rights in the USA. Everything you’re granted as a right, you are also denied as a right by other laws. It’s the playbook of a tyrannical society. Name ANY law that you have a right to, and then look up to find another law taking that exact right away from you.
Just like a tyrannical society, you’re guaranteed nothing. But you can fly under the radar if you agree with the political powers that be. Which is no different than any country at any point in history.
And what is the justification for the US attacking human rights?
Welcome to the land of dual sim, my requirement since 2003. It’s incredibly useful even if only professionally.
Up until earlier this year this was easy. Any sandboxing app like MultipleApps would load WhatsApp and then you’d have a clean break if you chose. But Zuck decided to block all non original instances, giving a warning for about 6 months that it wasn’t supported and bad and lies about stealing your data, then just logged out and that was the end.
Now very few sandboxes work and in my experience it’s only the root level ones that come with your device. From there you can block contacts or permissions for WhatsApp.
But I think you’ve got it backwards as you’ll be the one with the mixed contacts. Your work colleagues won’t have your personal number and your personal colleagues won’t have your work number. And if they did, it would message two separate WhatsApp instances. They wouldn’t see your other contacts, it’s not like Outlook.
And in that case a free Google voice number on WhatsApp’s second account in the same app, would work just fine for you. That’s how I have 4 WhatsApp on my 1 device. 2 physical sims always on, plus google voice, and an esim. Each WhatsApp instance with a second account switch and then the second WhatsApp in my phone’s sandbox.