I never expected that they’d put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
It’s one of those things that everyone will be crazy about for a week and then… poof, it will just become irrelevant, because it doesn’t really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
Maybe it’s Zucc’s way to get us acquainted with treating bots like humans, so one day he can finally come out as a robot and be accepted by the wider societyI never expected that they’d put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
it doesn’t really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): “Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world.”
What a cringe :(
Hmm, that makes a little bit more sense, but yes, still cringe corporate move trying to monetize on the AI craze
I’m not sure the robots want him, either.
It’s not about what people want, it’s about what them want people to use.
Unnecessary feature bloat, that’s what it is.
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Snapchat did it. Meta needs to do it, too.
Some people are crazy about sites like Character.ai, and people were using chatgpt as their own therapist when it first came out. There’s an audience for these types of chatbots
Why would you use WhatsApp in the first place?
It is basically the default in most latam countries.
Many Asia countries too, probably Europe too.
Africa and the middle east as well
We’re quickly running out of continents here…
Quick I’ll name another one!!!… North America! Oh crap… Antarctica!…
If you meet someone new they may essentially force you to (through lack of other options), if you wish to communicate with them
In this case one of two parties must join a new platform. Either they join a privacy respecting one or they can call/text. If they can’t respect that boundary further communication will not be required.
no wonder you’re on here so much.
The network effect is a powerful force. If you want to talk to loved ones (or more and more, businesses) you are forced to use this platform, which hands inordinate amounts of power to the likes of Meta or other proprietary platforms that only ever have their own interests at heart.
I refuse to bind myself to proprietary platforms that I have no way to leave without insurmountable switching costs. Behaving this way is not without personal cost: It is more difficult to talk to me for others which annoys them or discourages them from trying. It also makes me look like a pedantic ass on platforms like these (although my phrasing there probably doesn’t help I admit).
There are plenty of privacy and freedom respecting platforms that allow interoperability and I think it is better to use those rather than adding my bit to the network effect that makes WhatsApp the de facto standard, strengthening it further.
Many countries like the UK charge 35p for an MMS. So to send pictures to anyone you needed an internet connected messenger.
SMS/MMS effectively died here.
So if I want to communicate everyone uses WhatsApp or iMessage
And most importantly, SMS is not secure [1].
I love proton but I’d rather use SMS every damn day than WhatsApp
It doesn’t matter what you or I want if people are on WhatsApp, and you want to talk to them, you have to use it.
You can always use SMS or email, every user has access to one of those services, they just aren’t as quick or convenient as data mining shit-apps.
they just aren’t as quick or convenient
Yeah because that’s not at all important in communicating with the general population
Problem is people expect a much richer media experience than SMS.
It would be really weird to SMS some to say oh check your emails I sent you a cool meme.
Because the rest of the world is not stuck to iMessage/SMS? We all adopted a messenger app back around 2010-12, that continues to work across all smartphones, computers and some feature phones, that has actual E2EE for one-to-one chats, even if the metadata now goes to Facebook instead of Apple.
This is why proprietary messaging solutions are bad for both freedom and privacy. You are stuck with antifeatures and you have no way of truely verifying privacy
End-to-end encryption is the best possible safeguard against Meta snooping on your data.
This has always been my biggest pet peeve with WhatsApp. Yes, they might encrypt it all and the encryption might be practically unbreakable, but what worries me is what Meta might do with the private encryption keys. Lem me elaborate further.
I’ll start by trying to explain how key-based encryption, the type of encryption WhatsApp uses, work at their core, for those who don’t know (THIS IS GOING TO BE AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION). Imagine you want a friend to send you a message with super sensitive contents. Here’s what you do to guarantee that no one else can read it but you:
- First, you generate two keys, which are pretty much two really big numbers. One will be called the public key and the other one will be the private key.
- Then, you go to the person who wants to send you stuff and say “Hey John, remember that really important message you wanted to send me? Take my public key and make sure you cypher your message using it”.
- Once you receive the message, you decypher it using the private key. Using the private key is the only way you can read this message. You can’t use the public key for it because it won’t work.
This means that, if someone else manages to get the encrypted message, they will need the private key to read what it says, but they don’t have it, only you have it. The only thing they can do keep guessing what that key is until they find what it was and read the message, but that can take up to millions of years, even using supercomputers.
As you can see, this works really well for sending messages without anyone but the sender and the reciever knowing what is being said, and that’s why it’s so used in encrypted message apps…
…but what if Meta has access to the private keys? I mean, what if, after WhatsApp creating the public and private keys for messaging, the private key is retrieved and stored in Meta’s servers, making them able to read all the messages you receive?
Can someone with more experience in the subject say if my concerns are valid?
I have never believed Facebook when they’ve said they don’t have the ability to see your messages. There’s no proof of that whatsoever. And it’s fucking FACEBOOK.
I would be SHOCKED if they didn’t have access to private keys.
I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain… maybe it’s not
What I’d be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be “Oh, this person texts their mum every morning”, but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be “accused” of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that’s besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.
In the end none of us have anything to hide… until we suddenly do
I know this wasn’t argued here, but I’d like to make it clear anyways: You don’t have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don’t want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.
I share that concern and would not rely on my messaging being secure. Anyways as far as they state it themself, your private key for decrypting should stay on your device (in fact it uses the signal protocol and does a few more steps, e.g. to implement shared sessions over multiple devices. You can have a look at their FAQ, they’ve linked a white paper within it describing the technical details). But the main question is in my opinion: do you trust the guarantees they give you? It’s the same struggle as with any proprietary software. You can trust them or you don’t, but you will never know without access to the source code.
What do you mean, might? The keys will be stolen and sold to the highest bidder on the black market, probably to state surveillance organizations.
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Not if you have friends.
Well I just converted my friends.
If they love you they will download an app for you. And it’s important to keep in mind that most modern mobile OSes will stop showing notifications from an app or even hide the app if the users doesn’t open it after X amount of time.
So it’s up to you to keep the conversation alive enough they get used to using it. If my 83 year old father can, so can your friends.
Just get your friends on signal or something similar. Friends don’t let friends use WhatsApp.
Or if you want to check your messages on more than one device. I don’t like telegram much but I use it because I can access my messages from both my phone and tablet, signal is locked to my phone and my pc.
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Try living in a society that has WhatsApp as default. I cannot do my job without it.
I don’t forget what it’s like to be 15, because I had a great childhood, but I also grew up and started doing crazy things like moving out, renting a home, etc, and if your landlord requires you to download WhatsApp, or any other app to communicate, you do it. Otherwise you’ll find yourself on the street, messaging yourself on Signal lmao.
My landlord told me to download WhatsApp and I just said “nah I use email”. Super easy cleared up in 5 seconds.
That’s awesome. Sounds like you already had a lease signed. Now try that again when you’re one of the 60 others applying to the house.
They’ll rip up your lease on the spot for being difficult.
Nah I didn’t. Have had it for jobs and stuff too. People are usually willing to do email if you ask.
If someone is unwilling to do business with you via email and require you to use WhatsApp then you dodged a bullet.
if your landlord requires you to download WhatsApp, or any other app to communicate, you do it.
Your landlord tells you what apps to download on your phone and you do it? What parallel reality do you live in?
The one where I need a place to rent, and the real estate agent communicates between my landlord and myself via WhatsApp group chat?
Your landlord tells you no smoking in the house and you do it? What parallel reality do you live in?
Your landlord tells you no smoking in the house and you do it?
When I did smoke cigarettes, I would go outside not to have a smelly appartment. I did keep smoking joins inside with prejudice though, it’s not like they’d visit to check up on me.
the real estate agent communicates between my landlord and myself via WhatsApp group chat?
That’s dystopian… The agency has my e-mail to send me bills and occasionally some important residential information, they have my phone number for absolute emergencies, other than that I don’t want to hear from them or… chat with them? I’m still processing why do you need to be in a group chat or how can landlord force you to install an app on your phone. What if you don’t have a smartphone? It’s not like it’s obligatory to have one.
Renting an apartment is a mutual agreement for which you pay your rent, it’s not like they are doing you a favour or anything, and you behave like you’re their slave or something.
Wtf you mean send you bills?
My landlord doesn’t send me bills. Upon moving in, you’re required to call the water/hydro/gas company and put the utilities in your name. No bills get sent to the landlord. They’re not my mom.
My landlord went through a realtor. She paid the realtor good money to find tenants and deal with the tenants. The group chat is a way for us, the landlord, and the realtor she hired to stay in the loop together.
You mention phone calls, what year is it? My landlord doesn’t call me. That leaves no paper trail, and is annoying. She sends a message via WhatsApp. Not to mention the group chat is for US to also get in touch, if we need something fixed. It’s not a one way “slave” machine.
You’re very ignorant.
Not that simple, unfortunately :( The problem is that one particular vendor (Meta) controls the client - the app - to the service (Whatsapp). Right now we can only hope that Signal doesn’t add this kind of feature. There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.
And that’s why European Union introduced the Digital Markets Act. By March 2024, Meta will need to give a way for third party clients to communicate with WhatsApp users in 1-to-1 chats. Group chats will probably follow 2 years after.
There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.
Yeah, that was a bizarre move, but it doesn’t interfere or interoperate with any of its comms functions. Also I have never even read online about anyone using this crypto feature, let alone known any one who did.
I turned everyone around me to Matrix on my own instance. There are other options as well
I don’t have friends yet, but as I am forming relationships, I am converting people to XMPP.
I’m just gonna say, end to end encryption is jack shit when they can just access the content at the source, analyze it with local rules and call sending to meta how often you talk about a certain topic and with whom telemetry
Or for that matter you could just not properly encrypt it
That’s a lost fight, at least in my circle and in my circles’s circles. It was already difficult to move some of them to Signal and Telegram but even then, they kept using Whatsapp.
It should be managed at nation /European Union level, they should forbid this shit.
Signal is a bad app, you still cannot long press to select multiple photos. You have to select one and then press the add more button, open up a different gallery view and select multiple from there. But they add emojis and remove SMS support so woo. 😞
And this makes it a bad app? Slight inconvenience and some less emojis? You’re right that it needs improvement, but I’ll happily accept this in exchange for not just another stupid big-tech company snooping around my personal stuff. I’m so fucking pissed at the constant privacy attacks from these evil ass holes
Yeah that makes it a bad app, they removed a huge feature that makes it difficult to get less privacy conscious people over to it and it is focused on gimmicky features instead of.qualoty of life improvement. It is annoying to be missing easily implementable features that would not impact privacy.
I still use it for the better part of a decade but I think it is a bad app for what it is trying to do.
Write the code and make a pull request. If you can’t, at least open an issue and let them know.
I have provided feedback for this and another issue and never once have I received anything back or seen a change.
To be honest the feature I’m talking about should be recognised by their team as missing and shouldn’t need an email but I did nonetheless.
I don’t want Meta in WhatsApp
You already have it. Whatsapp = Meta
Thank you, that was the point.
I don’t love WhatsApp*
it’s ui is so old!
It’s old but it’s still up to date. Meta sucks but the UI of WhatsApp works perfectly for what it is.
They updated it to material design 2 on the beta app a while ago.
But AI generated stickers!
Easy, don’t use Zuckerbot crap
Not easy when all my friends and family use it
And in other parts of the world where it’s just a standard. I was surprised when I saw WhatsApp numbers on advertisements with the WhatsApp logo. Hard not to be on WhatsApp in those places.
Also my friends and Family, but this is why I don’t use this shit, I can also communicate with them, better still, with a simple call, perhaps with an SMS (yes, it still exists) or directly in person, accompanied with some beers.
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WhatsApp seems to be something only foreigners and drug dealers use in my experience. What’s the appeal?
You know, when you’re one of those foreigners whose peers all exclusively use WhatsApp, be it child or grandparent, that’s a pretty big appeal. To me, you’re the weird foreigner who doesn’t use WhatsApp ;)
Fair enough, I’m just saying locally no one uses it except really sketchy people who get weird looks when they ask if anyone has it. It’s pretty much either Facebook Messenger or Snapchat around these parts.
You’re american, right? And you use an iPhone, right?
Yes and no. I hate Apple, but it’s definitely the dominate force around here, everyone has one.
You won my trust, partly.
Facebook Messenger or Snapchat
…that’s somehow worse than WhatsApp.
I never said that? I don’t even know what it looks like because it’s so uncommon here, lol.
Apologies if I was unclear: I was making a statement that by using FB Messenger and Snapchat, the people there have, imho, somehow found worse chat apps to be using for privacy and security than even WhatsApp.
I don’t think the gen pop thinks about privacy and security with their messaging apps here.
‘Foreigners’ to where? The US?
I don’t use WhatsApp at all, but it irks me when ‘foreigner’ is used on the internet as if ‘we’ are all in a single country.
You’re a foreigner to me.
Yes. I am a foreigner to you. I’m saying, people who emigrate here seem to use it. I’m sorry I didn’t type out “people who emigrate here” and used a shorthand term, hopefully someday you can forgive me.
Where is here? You never said where you’re talking about.
Nahhhh drug dealers use Signal.
Never even heard of that one.
Joke on you!
It’s awesome.
I hope you’re not buying drugs from someone then
Not these days, weeds at the store now, my man.
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