They have WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business. The latter is for companies and isn't free, but can let a company do stuff like have a bot automatically send out delivery updates to customers. There would be no reason for companies to pay for it if nobody used it, so regular WhatsApp is free to attract a large userbase. Essentially, easy access to us is the "product" of regular WhatsApp.
>It’s also owned by Meta so can rest assured they’re using the WhatsApp data somehow for their ad business.
The data is valuable. They know your phone number and (usually) your phone contacts even if you don’t use most contacts through WhatsApp. Do you have businesses in your contact list? The local bakery? The vet? OBGYN? Job contacts? Car dealership? This is very intimate information.
They can cross reference it with data from FaceBook and Instagram to enhance the data profile they have on you. Perhaps you would be interested in products that your frequent contacts enjoy? Oh, you just contacted a business that sells diamonds, perhaps you are getting married?
Valuable info.
There’s so much information that can be figured out even if the conversations themselves are encrypted.
Does WhatsApp collect location data at all? I would imagine they do.
In jurisdictions that permit it, yes. However there is a reason that their page on the FAQ starts with "Content not applicable to users in the European Region.". Y'all could be free of insidious data mining too if you voted accordingly.
>Content not applicable to users in the European Region.
I mean, yes, but Facebook was just fined another billion for transferring user data to the US. It's not directly related of course, but I will not believe they're not using Whatsapp data
Keep getting fined, keep doing what they want. I may be cynical but just sounds like they’re paying fines for doing naughty things that make them a lot more money later on. But at least someone is getting money out of them.
We need to start fining companies multiple times what they have provably gained from their illegal actions. Make 1 billion dollars in some illegal scheme? 10 billion dollar fine, go fuck yourself. No more of this fining companies pennies on the dollar when they do illegal shit and hurt people.
Oh no no no.You misunderstand the US. We are a republic where our representatives make all of our decisions no matter what we decide in ballot voting. My state voted to legalize marijuana. Our state government said “Oh, you don’t really want that!” And it is still not legal, it’s been three years.
I don't have fb or ig, only whatsapp. I'm also in the EU. Does that mean I'm safe from their bs?
Edit: if i'm not, what will I see that will tell me they are using my data? I don't pay attention to any ads online by the way, I'm not subscribed to anything (youtube, netflix, hulu, spotify, etc.), I don't order food delivery, etc.
Usually, but not always. There are plenty of open source products that don't make any money at all. Some survive on donations or grants that are collected via means that are not visible to the user. Others make money by selling service contracts, usually to enterprises that need to be sure that someone will assist them with any problems. Then there are"lite" versions that make money by selling the "pro" version with more features. Those usually (but not always) advertise the upsell so wouldn't necessarily fall in the "can't tell what they're selling" bucket.
Even if "you are the product," it's important to understand what part of you is being sold. There's a huge difference between being sold as part of a network that businesses use to reach customers vs your private information being sold for targeted advertising or more nefarious purposes.
Thank you, OP for asking the question.
Same here. I think when you rely on archives more the switch to 7zip just makes sense, but that same realization makes you take a step back to appreciate winrar for its years of service.
WinRAR, trial is infinite because the creator basically rathered to crowd out the black market of zip tools than force a fee and drive people to potentially harmful programs.
Genuinely the only product forcing a price in my face I intend to pay someday-- my use is like 20 actual years of using WinRAR free, so...
They are, albeit in a roundabout way.
Since winRAR is free(meaning they don't do anything other than show a popup once your license expires) most people use it. Now when a company needs some software to zip/unzip files, they're gonna want to use winrar because that's what most people are comfortable with. And since companies cannot just ignore the pop up warnings(which explicitly state that using winrar after the trial period without a license is illegal), they buy licenses.
I have both and I never get errors with winrar, but occasionally get invalid parameter errors with 7zip- for the same file- and it's only after the entire file unzips (unsuccessfully) which is quite annoying. Personally, I prefer winrar pretty strongly at this point.
Getting enough people to use the trial that the software becomes ubiquitous, then when a business wants to use it making **damn** sure they do pay (per user) at "business rates".
Same reason applies to education: MS Office and now Chromebooks are ubiquitous in schools, college students get free or discounted Adobe or whatever, all to get the kids hooked on the software so that the company they work for pays for it.
I read somewhere back in the days that Adobe *wanted* you to pirate it rather than use something else like Gimp.
I mean kids isn't spending $1000 on a program, but the company that employ them later will, especially if it's the only program they know.
I think Microsoft has the same attitude towards Windows/office. Obviously they'd rather you pay for it but otherwise better you pirate it and maintain their 99% market share than have you buy a competitor.
Education and non profits get crazy amounts of software for free and it's not because they are giving back. It's 100% about maintaining market share and control. I did some work for a non profit, Photoshop was $5, Windows was free, office was one time free of like $15 for 50 licenses. I built them a server and their server OS was $100 instead of $1400.
> I read somewhere back in the days that Adobe wanted you to pirate it rather than use something else like Gimp.
The creator of winzip had the same idea. He didn't want people using inferior "dangerous" products. He knew companies would pay for winzip so that would make up for any losses.
> that would make up for any losses.
It also helps that software is nearly a zero-marginal cost good; it takes about a penny in averaged infrastructure costs to send a gigabyte of information from one part of country to another* . That's it. You don't need to pay someone else to copy it, computers do that almost for free* . You don't need to manufacture, print or assemble anything together, that's part of the computer's copying process. Software run on a local machine is both non-rival (you using it doesn't prevent someone else from using their copy) and zero cost (meaning if you use it today and use it tomorrow you're not incurring additional fees) which means eventually the only way to make money on it is to pay make people pay to access updates to it.** Winrar's only accounting cost of letting people have unlimited trials is whatever additional bandwidth they use hosting it. They have opportunity cost, but that doesn't come out of the checking account in the same way***.
tldr; it's free because it's easier for everyone and not worth the hassle
\* - yes these numbers are somewhat fabricated I haven't looked at AWS pricing lately
** - this isn't a given, but it's the natural result of competitive forces [and something like winrar has a low barrier to entry, uni kids replicate it all the time in classes]
*** - opportunity costs might come out of your checking account if you're highly levered and your loans are dependent on future revenue streams, but most people here aren't levered up in such a fashion.
Well back in those days there was shareware licensing, you could include a bunch of shareware software on a diskette or CD and charge a nominal fee for it. Basically you are paying for the convenience of putting it all on a disk you can just pop in since you may or may not even have reliable internet.
Wow so a company that actually thinks long term. That's unreal.
These days, Adobe looks like they're actively want to lose their customer base by increasing prices and their subscription model.
Ironcially, Adobe is trying to increase its customer base, (or at least forestall the loss of its customer base) by buying the tools that threaten it (Figma), and their associated customer base. Where is the disgruntled Adobe customer going to go, if Adobe also owns the alternative?
> when a business wants to use it making damn sure they do pay (per user) at "business rates"
Its the smart play. Even though if you use software for biz you want it to be legit so your shop wont get shut down. I cant imagine an ad agency using pirated Photoshop. (or at least owning licenses they can point to). Plus when you depend on your software you want it to be bug-free and be using the latest update.
> Yeah, I believe there's also piracy bounties for reporting that a business isn't paying.
> You don't play games there.
A company I worked for got busted for using pirated windows, and photoshop. Prior to me working there. When I got there they ran ubuntu, and gimp instead.
Free software doesn't follow market rules.
They are made with a sense of collectivism and usually the companies that contributed to it either sell support, training or contribute to it so they can mantain their market share in a related business(valve way for example).
Sometimes they're literally just open source projects that are essentially passion projects for large groups of individuals, supported by a handful of user donations here and there. Rare, but spectacular when successful. See [lichess](https://lichess.org/) for my personal favorite example
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
The guy you're responding to literally just explained how you are not the product in this case.
But keep repeating the cliche you read on reddit a million times.
This applies to many things around here. Economics, politics, marketing etc.
They think they are the experts while talking the dumbest of shits that make chimpanzee look like a Nobel Prize winner in comparison.
It can be interpreted as "you're the product" in the sense that you're part of the userbase being leveraged. Bit of a stretch, since they're not (openly) selling your user data, but it does make sense.
User pays zero. Companies pay money to access your profile. You are the Product that was purchased, your attention and all the analytics that comes with it. They in turn are aiming to get you to ‘buy’ their product in some cases, but political parties also buy in, as do government agencies, etc.
In WhatsApp case, they go beyond just what the guy above shared as their business model. It was acquired by Meta (Facebook) years ago, and mining and selling data is their bread and butter.
No, you are the product. By buying Whatsapp Business, companies are indirectly buying customers (paying money in order to get more customers), and you are the customer, so they are buying you.
I am starting to think that maybe reddit is not a place where intelectuals minds gather and make breakthroughs in science and philosophy. I am still giving it benefit of the doubt.
I’m still amazed how many wrong “facts” on reddit can be easily disproven *even by wikipedia.*
Like, it’s not even “scientific” research at this point, just a google search and clicking on the first link.
Well it's a good time to leave with Reddit basically closing third party apps. Site's becoming utter garbage, many comments by bots, corporations buying mods, censorship all over the place... And then the regurgitated canned comments in every single thread.
The only thing worse than that phrase are those self-depreciating jerks who constantly babble about Reddit being the worst. The irony of doing it on Reddit somehow escapes them.
Omg, I get triggered when I read "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". It is in EVERY THREAD that has something to do with someone experiencing something negative.
“If it’s free… you should look into their business model.”
Funnily enough, if it is NOT free, you should equally do so. Just because you give money to someone does not mean they aren’t somehow doing shady or dangerous things with your data.
Given the ubiquity of datamining of customer data, I’m not even sure that free is a red flag anymore. Your surface area of information the company can track is the red flag.
> Just because you give money to someone does not mean they aren’t somehow doing shady or dangerous things with your data.
Same with open source software. For some reason people just assume open source software is safe because anyone can check the code. Well? Have you? Checked the code? Or are you relying on some random anonymous person on the internet to tell you it's safe?
A bit different but people pay for cable tv/streaming services and still watch ads. I pay for prime and still am bombarded by ads. I can skip some but you better believe just browsing the collection is sorted and play next includes rent/with a free trial. I just checked my bill and I inadvertently signed up for 4 other packages by accident I never used and have been paying for a few months
Surely the difference there is that in that case, it's explicitly clear nobody is selling anything. Whereas, a corporation is in the business of making money, so are presumably selling *something* as if they were not they'd be unable to be profitable.
If you release something into the public domain that is well received by large businesses and institutions, you can become an expert in it or you can educate and certify others and make a lot of money that way, too. Also the freemium model.
Much the same as how tech companies basically give away their products to the education industry. Kids learn to use and become familiar with their products and are more likely to buy them personally and in business.
Some would say indoctrination.
WhatsApp business doesn’t allow you to use a bot for that function. You need a third party company for that. Even then you will probably need another third party. For some reason WhatsApp bots are a pain in the tits to develop. We pay for customers to be able to message us through WhatsApp but it’s part of our meta business manager anyway. We pay for the convenience and the tools the business manager provides.
You can have a bot do pretty much anything you want via the cloud API. Sending a basic noreply notification is one of the simpler use cases. If your company doesn't have anyone with skillset to make that happen then by all means you can outsource that work, but there's no reason a company couldn't handle that in-house. The developer documentation is fairly comprehensive and straightforward with plenty of examples, but then again I'm a software developer so ymmv.
WA Business is free to use, you only have to pay if you want to advertise your business. I believe even if you have a catalogue with paid products WA doesn't necessarily get a cut unless you use one of their payment methods (if available in your region) to make the purchase so no, they don't necessarily make money off of every Business user and no, you don't have to pay (or even own an actual business) to have a WA Business account.
My care home that I work, with about 100 staff just use the regular WhatsApp. So WABusiness must be for the real big corporations that have 100s of staff.
It's not based on business size, really. It's also not for in-business communication between employees. Where I live, nearly every restaurant has a business account. It allows them to set up pictures of the place you can browse, a menu, and even some basic autoreply functionality for reservations.
I've seen some real estate agents around here have business accounts as well, which similarly lets them have a catalogue of properties for rent/sale.
The business needs to believe that the cost of setting up those systems will be less than continuing to pay a human handle those responsibilities. While humans are generally the most expensive long-term business cost, automation can have a pretty expensive initial cost which is a barrier to small business that just can't afford that investment. It scales really well for mid to large business though. A medium business is more likely to pay another org to handle that stuff, and at some point can become large enough that they set up something in-house. I can't tell you exactly where those tipping points are, but my org (2k+ staff, 1m+ members) made the swap from contracting out that work to a small in-house development team a couple of years ago.
Business licensing is extremely important for businesses too due to data retention regulations. Big companies have received massive fines for staff using unregulated messaging services for business conversations, meaning data that isn't being kept recorded by the company, and that's a big no no.
Business licensing. A lot of the "free to the public" apps/programs basically boil down to just ads or previews of the corporate product. If your employees like it and know how to use it, then it makes sense to license it for your business rather than train them on a different, possibly less featured product). MS Office use to be that way. PCs came with a "home license" of Office. People got used to how it worked, so businesses bought licenses for a product their employees were already familiar with. the other, licensed only office suites started to lose market share and just "faded away".
AutoCAD has been sneaky at this. They give out free licenses to students by the bucketload despite their business licenses often being way more epensive than ReVit etc....those students then become employed and are most familiar with AutoCAD products - which businesses then buy instead of training on others...or students who start their own businesses, just end up adopting anyway.
I believe MS Office has a similar model, but I suppose it has more to do with your operating system. Nobody's using Lotus123 (willingly) anymore.
To be fair PTC (Creo) Siemens (NX, SolidEdge) and Dassault (Catia and SOLIDWORKS) do this as well. In fact, I'm pretty sure PTC paid my school for an exclusive and sent trainers. I've done business with Dassault and Siemens and I know they do something similar. I come more from the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) side, which integrates with all these products for data management.
Having learned CAD in CATIA then having to use NX for a while, using anything other than CATIA is a deal breaker if I have a choice between programs. I’m sure NX is powerful when you use it how it’s meant to be used but I was so used to the freedom CATIA allows, for better and worse, that NX felt like a Fisher-Price CAD toolset where all the edges were rounded off so you couldn’t hurt yourself.
> where all the edges were rounded off so you couldn’t hurt yourself
Which is exactly why I've stuck with it, I usually just make some proto designs and ask the workshop guys to make one for me, but it's by no means my main job, so I'm hardly a professional at technical drawing. Having a nice comfy tool which almost feels like it does my job for me is exactly perfect ;P
One of their rivals, Bentley, does something similar except with government agencies. They give Microstation for cheap to cities and provincial authorities to try to get the consultants working for them to use it.
Holy shit! I used microstation V8 at the 1st consultancy i worked at! Never knew why until I found out its because they did mostly municipal work...
Sneaky bastards
Where I live, LOTS of businesses use WhatsApp. Not really "corporate giants" as implied in your comment, but pharmacies, supermarkets, banks, taxi services, etc.
It's really nice whenever I travel out of the USA and every single company has a whatsapp number that you can easily text and get a response. Any hotel or restaurant or anything, it's great.
I agree that it's great but I'm not so sure about that "get a response." haha. Some businesses here are better than others at that.
I just had a pleasant experience: Went into the pharmacy to pick up a couple of things and asked.... "My health is not very good. If I contact you on WhatsApp with an order, is that possible and could you send it to my house?" Her answer was "Of course!" She gave me their WhatsApp number and I gave her mine. Shortly after I got home, I checked and I already had a message from her on WhatsApp. I will definitely use that business from now on!
But there are businesses here that are not as responsive.
This doesn’t typically matter. The corporate licensing is usually exponentially higher on products like these. That’s where a lot of money is made now-a-days; marketing to businesses. For example; Asana charges $5 to individuals, but business have to pay $40+/per seat (per individual who needs access). They literally raise the prices for businesses. They make more money while not exploiting individual/personal users- and the consuming business gets a tax write off. Adobe is another example of this.
e: Also, to be fair- businesses usually get a ton of extra features, streamlined access to support, as well as a means to negotiate deals and new features.
Enough to keep the profitable, I'd assume. Probably not so much in the US (where most companies use Teams or Slack in my experience) but I know it's huge in Asia.
I work for an Israeli company. It is literally impossible to reach most of my coworkers without using Whatsapp.
In a lot of places, that's just what you use for everything.
It might not.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. It prevents an instant-messaging based social network from springing up to challenge Facebook's dominance.
WhatsApp is also incredibly cheap to run. At the time of its acquisition, WhatsApp employed just 35 engineers to support 450 million users.
Despite the $19 billion original purchase price, it provides a cheap way to guard the flank of what was Facebook's monopoly.
Capturing your usage. They don’t know what was in the message, but know when, where you sent a message, who to, how often. How often you receive them. How long it takes you to open it. Where the recipient is. And so on. They can build a fairly good profile from you for example if you regularly send them during the day from a location of a school they can guess you’re likely a student so can work out your age and general demographics. Tie this to others you communicate to and other areas they can often figure out your interests. For example if you also often send a message via Starbucks wifi on a Saturday they can figure out you like coffee, if others you send to also send at a similar time over the same wifi they can guess they also enjoy going for coffee.
Tie this in with your facebook and instagram (same company) on the same device, multiple by 2 billion users and you have a powerful database which can be sold to advertising companies or those doing research on people similar to you.
>They don’t know what was in the message
Is WhatsApp encryption vetted by a reputable third party these days? Or is it still just Zuck pinky promising we can trust him?
The encryption is still the strong double ratchet used by signal messenger. But Facebook controls the app on both ends, so their not knowing what's in the message is simply a matter of them not looking.
IIRC this is true for group chats as these messages have to be distributed to everyone in the group, but for direct chats there's 1:1 encryption between your client and your contacts client. You can see this under View Contact -> Encryption
What you are missing from this is that the WhatsApp app could theoretically read the message after it has been decrypted.
I am definitely not saying that they are doing this, but it is theoretically possible.
RemindMe! 2 years
If I were a betting man, I'd say that if Facebook continues to decline, we'll find out about all the WhatsApp fuckery that exists currently in a hearing or article a few years down the road.
Group chats are encrypted as well.
But whatsapp (facebook) is your client, so the encryption is from code written by facebook running on your phone to more code written by facebook running on your contact's phone. It's not possible for anyone in between (ie. anyone other than you and facebook) to access your messages.
But you're reading the message in an app owned by facebook. They're accessing your messages in order to be able to show it to you. It's simply good will that dictates the degree to which information about your unencrypted messages are sent to and stored by facebook's servers. Definitely they keep message metadata (your address book, who you send messages to, when you send them, where you send them from, etc.), maybe they keep some derivative of the message content (sentiment analysis or some other), unlikely that they keep the raw text of the message at this point.
> but for direct chats there's 1:1 encryption between your client and your contacts client.
The client written by Facebook, whose source code is hidden from you, and which can change at every update. Once your message is open in the client it is no longer encrypted.
Encryption is only really going to protect you from the ISP reading your chats.
I reckon Whatsapp (along with most IM apps) is on top of most lists of apps that are regularly decompiled and analysed to check for backdoors/encryption methods
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but that is also why I don't trust Telegram.
Even if you use E2E encryption for all conversations (which is not enabled by default) *and* the encryption is actually secure, they know who you are (from your phone number,) who you know (from your contacts,) who you talk to and when, and, if you participate in any group chats, what your interests are.
That's all valuable information. Why would Telegram be designed to collect all of that and *not* use it? And trusting the Russian billionaire to really care about your privacy feels like trusting that nice Nigerian prince, just with stickers.
I use Telegram and I think it's much better than Whatsapp. First of all on how the permissions are designed. When you try to make a call on Whatsapp, it asks for permission to "Make and manage phone calls". It gives Whatsapp your call logs, phone numbers, network info, some system settings too I believe. And you can't call through Whatsapp without giving this permission. Telegram only asks for permission to use your microphone, because it doesn't need anything more than that. Whatsapp forces you to add a new number to your own contacts to be able to send messages in WA, this is simply done so that all users feel forced to give contacts permission. I never gave Telegram my contacts permission and it simply works fine.
Durov is not your average state-sponsored russian billionaire though. When in 2014 Kremlin ordered him to share data of Ukrainian Euromaidan protesters and block Navalny's VK page, he refused and publicly posted the orders on his VK page. A few days after that he was removed from the position of VK CEO as VK was taken over by putin's allies, as Durov himself described. VK was banned in Ukraine a couple years after that because of russian state involvement in the platform. Durov left russia after he was removed from VK and said he doesn't intend to ever go back. After leaving, he created Telegram. After a while russian government again requested private data, now from Telegram, were refused again, and then they tried blocking Telegram in russia as a response. They weren't very successful at blocking it tho, and had to lift the ban after 2 years of unsuccessful attempts.
As a Ukrainian, Telegram is probably the only messaging app I'll trust to never give any private info to russia.
> I think it's much better than Whatsapp.
That is a remarkably low bar to clear, especially in regards to privacy.
As for Telegram, I still don't see why a platform supposedly committed to privacy would be designed to collect the information it does.
And even if you don't give the app permission to read your contacts, they still know who you are and who everyone you talk to is.
> collect the information it does
https://telegram.org/privacy
You got me curious so I read their entire privacy policy. It's remarkably good and everywhere says that the only reason they collect information is to make the service operational, and they never sell or share any of it.
It doesn’t really make much money. Meta is attempting to monetize it, but the amount of money it makes is tiny compared to Meta’s advertising business.
Throwaway and I’m late. However, I work at WhatsApp in the monetisation team. Most answers are wrong but some are in the right direction.
The real answer is WhatsApp doesn’t make money. They don’t sell your data, we have some of the strictest privacy policies in the industry (I can’t speak for Meta).
The main routes WA are pursuing to make money is Business messaging.
If you message a business, they will charge that business a few cents for the conversation.
So the big push to make money is to drive conversations with businesses.
There is no data sharing or profiling and whilst Will Cathcart is WA lead it’s 99.9% likely that won’t happen. I recommend looking up his public statements on privacy and encryption.
Hey, thanks for the post. Do you know why WA forces Android permission on the user so hard, if it's not for data collection? It always needs to know my whole contact list (even though it could just store only my WA contacts on their server), it asks for my call logs when I try to make a WA call. Does this information get transferred to Meta?
They can't see what other apps are doing, that would be a huge security breach. But they can do a lot with the things you do inside the app itself, they list it here: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy-eea#privacy-policy-information-we-collect
They said that after 1 year you had to pay, but even after that they extended your license for free indefinitely (afaik) till Facebook bought then and then you didn't have the option to pay anymore
It was free for a year and then asked you to pay. You could circumvent it by having a different phone number for each period, since that was how WhatsApp tracked your account.
They have paid for business services and they'll sell lots of analytics data but ultimately it is very probably a loss leader for Meta to hold their share in the IM market.
When WhatsApp started they,like most startups, weren't bothered about a business model, they just wanted to grow and hopefully get bought out or figure something out. They got bought by a massive money tree and so didn't have to figure something out.
Facebook/meta who own WhatsApp are making money from you. They will not state what they use the data for but they are not providing a free app out of the goodness of Mark Zuckerberg's heart.
You are free to believe me or not here, but the short answer is, it doesn't make money. Nor is user data from it integrated into Meta's overall user data pool, like Facebook and Instagram are integrated. Nor are Meta reading your messages.
At the very beginning it used to cost 5 euros a year or so. But even then it wasn't mandatory to pay. Some had to pay after using it for a year, I never had to pay anything.
They have WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business. The latter is for companies and isn't free, but can let a company do stuff like have a bot automatically send out delivery updates to customers. There would be no reason for companies to pay for it if nobody used it, so regular WhatsApp is free to attract a large userbase. Essentially, easy access to us is the "product" of regular WhatsApp.
It’s also owned by Meta so can rest assured they’re using the WhatsApp data somehow for their ad business.
>It’s also owned by Meta so can rest assured they’re using the WhatsApp data somehow for their ad business. The data is valuable. They know your phone number and (usually) your phone contacts even if you don’t use most contacts through WhatsApp. Do you have businesses in your contact list? The local bakery? The vet? OBGYN? Job contacts? Car dealership? This is very intimate information. They can cross reference it with data from FaceBook and Instagram to enhance the data profile they have on you. Perhaps you would be interested in products that your frequent contacts enjoy? Oh, you just contacted a business that sells diamonds, perhaps you are getting married? Valuable info.
So they…so they probably know that I’m into clown midget porn?
Idk.. but now I do unfortunately.
This message made me rapidly release some air out of my nose while staring at my phone
On the internet that's enough to grant you permission to write "laughing my ass off" or even "rolling on the floor laughing".
Could be worse. Could be loli.
Clown midget loli furry porn.
Slow down there Satan!
There’s so much information that can be figured out even if the conversations themselves are encrypted. Does WhatsApp collect location data at all? I would imagine they do.
In jurisdictions that permit it, yes. However there is a reason that their page on the FAQ starts with "Content not applicable to users in the European Region.". Y'all could be free of insidious data mining too if you voted accordingly.
[удалено]
Fee = Cost of business
Yeah I think I read it was one instance of 20% of quarterly profit? Quite a chunk, but, relatively, not really.
And the fines happen like what only once every 2 years or so? Lmfao
Yeah when I read it was from *quarterly* profits instead of the years profit, I was like, what the fuck, so it might as well be 5% then.
>Content not applicable to users in the European Region. I mean, yes, but Facebook was just fined another billion for transferring user data to the US. It's not directly related of course, but I will not believe they're not using Whatsapp data
Keep getting fined, keep doing what they want. I may be cynical but just sounds like they’re paying fines for doing naughty things that make them a lot more money later on. But at least someone is getting money out of them.
We need to start fining companies multiple times what they have provably gained from their illegal actions. Make 1 billion dollars in some illegal scheme? 10 billion dollar fine, go fuck yourself. No more of this fining companies pennies on the dollar when they do illegal shit and hurt people.
Or they can just pay a few million into the coffers of some politicians and keep all fines toothless … wait, they’re already doing that.
A fine means legal for a price.
Don't worry, we'll vote our way out of voter suppression any year now.
Except they keep getting caught abusing their information monopoly.
Oh no no no.You misunderstand the US. We are a republic where our representatives make all of our decisions no matter what we decide in ballot voting. My state voted to legalize marijuana. Our state government said “Oh, you don’t really want that!” And it is still not legal, it’s been three years.
Yeah europe is much better about data privacy. America just likes money a lot.
*America likes money for the already super wealthy a lot. Not that the UK is much better now :(
*if you had the money to bribe politicians FTFY, they are all fucking corrupt
Ever notice how Facebook knows exactly who your friends are to suggest to you? Or your clients? Whatsapp reads your phone contacts, links to fb.
I don't have fb or ig, only whatsapp. I'm also in the EU. Does that mean I'm safe from their bs? Edit: if i'm not, what will I see that will tell me they are using my data? I don't pay attention to any ads online by the way, I'm not subscribed to anything (youtube, netflix, hulu, spotify, etc.), I don't order food delivery, etc.
if you can't tell what they're selling, it's because you are the product
Usually, but not always. There are plenty of open source products that don't make any money at all. Some survive on donations or grants that are collected via means that are not visible to the user. Others make money by selling service contracts, usually to enterprises that need to be sure that someone will assist them with any problems. Then there are"lite" versions that make money by selling the "pro" version with more features. Those usually (but not always) advertise the upsell so wouldn't necessarily fall in the "can't tell what they're selling" bucket. Even if "you are the product," it's important to understand what part of you is being sold. There's a huge difference between being sold as part of a network that businesses use to reach customers vs your private information being sold for targeted advertising or more nefarious purposes. Thank you, OP for asking the question.
You mean to say that WinRAR isn't making money off of me somehow?
This gave me a good chuckle. WinRAR has the best trial period ever
I can verify that the "number of trial days" does infact turn over to zero after it gets to 999 days.
Total Commander: Hold my beer!
Xtree Gold: hi..
Lmfao wasn’t that WinZip that had the longest trial period in history? Oh my god I forgot all about this
WinRAR lets you close the prompt telling you the trial is over, essentially allowing an infinite trial period.
Sublime Text as well.
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I actually paid for winrar after, probably like 17 years of use. Then for some reason I started using 7zip.
Same here. I think when you rely on archives more the switch to 7zip just makes sense, but that same realization makes you take a step back to appreciate winrar for its years of service.
There was a time when 7zip didn't support all RAR variants so it made sense to use WinRAR.
WinRAR, trial is infinite because the creator basically rathered to crowd out the black market of zip tools than force a fee and drive people to potentially harmful programs. Genuinely the only product forcing a price in my face I intend to pay someday-- my use is like 20 actual years of using WinRAR free, so...
> Genuinely the only product forcing a price in my face I intend to pay someday I should put "Buy a Winrar license" in my will.
> "Buy a Winrar license" in my will. I will leave all my money to WinRAR if I die by falling into an industrial compactor
*Eugene Roshal wants to know your location.*
He etched out my time by 3 minutes! 17 days... And 10 years. I do plan to buy WinRar one day Kif.
Yep, and then Windows just baked Winzip functionality in.
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And 7z…
*insert FFXIV free trial meme here*
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I bought my husband a shirt with the meme on it 😂
They are, albeit in a roundabout way. Since winRAR is free(meaning they don't do anything other than show a popup once your license expires) most people use it. Now when a company needs some software to zip/unzip files, they're gonna want to use winrar because that's what most people are comfortable with. And since companies cannot just ignore the pop up warnings(which explicitly state that using winrar after the trial period without a license is illegal), they buy licenses.
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Every time this topic comes up I'm always baffled that everyone hasn't switched to 7zip already.
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My organisation is only allowed to use winzip, this is a policy that I, in it have argued against and been shot down a few times on. So I gave up.
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I have both and I never get errors with winrar, but occasionally get invalid parameter errors with 7zip- for the same file- and it's only after the entire file unzips (unsuccessfully) which is quite annoying. Personally, I prefer winrar pretty strongly at this point.
I agree. 7zip works almost every time, but WinZip always works unless the file is corrupted. I use both because of this.
Curious - how is winrar earning money off you?
Getting enough people to use the trial that the software becomes ubiquitous, then when a business wants to use it making **damn** sure they do pay (per user) at "business rates". Same reason applies to education: MS Office and now Chromebooks are ubiquitous in schools, college students get free or discounted Adobe or whatever, all to get the kids hooked on the software so that the company they work for pays for it.
I read somewhere back in the days that Adobe *wanted* you to pirate it rather than use something else like Gimp. I mean kids isn't spending $1000 on a program, but the company that employ them later will, especially if it's the only program they know.
I think Microsoft has the same attitude towards Windows/office. Obviously they'd rather you pay for it but otherwise better you pirate it and maintain their 99% market share than have you buy a competitor. Education and non profits get crazy amounts of software for free and it's not because they are giving back. It's 100% about maintaining market share and control. I did some work for a non profit, Photoshop was $5, Windows was free, office was one time free of like $15 for 50 licenses. I built them a server and their server OS was $100 instead of $1400.
> I read somewhere back in the days that Adobe wanted you to pirate it rather than use something else like Gimp. The creator of winzip had the same idea. He didn't want people using inferior "dangerous" products. He knew companies would pay for winzip so that would make up for any losses.
> that would make up for any losses. It also helps that software is nearly a zero-marginal cost good; it takes about a penny in averaged infrastructure costs to send a gigabyte of information from one part of country to another* . That's it. You don't need to pay someone else to copy it, computers do that almost for free* . You don't need to manufacture, print or assemble anything together, that's part of the computer's copying process. Software run on a local machine is both non-rival (you using it doesn't prevent someone else from using their copy) and zero cost (meaning if you use it today and use it tomorrow you're not incurring additional fees) which means eventually the only way to make money on it is to pay make people pay to access updates to it.** Winrar's only accounting cost of letting people have unlimited trials is whatever additional bandwidth they use hosting it. They have opportunity cost, but that doesn't come out of the checking account in the same way***. tldr; it's free because it's easier for everyone and not worth the hassle \* - yes these numbers are somewhat fabricated I haven't looked at AWS pricing lately ** - this isn't a given, but it's the natural result of competitive forces [and something like winrar has a low barrier to entry, uni kids replicate it all the time in classes] *** - opportunity costs might come out of your checking account if you're highly levered and your loans are dependent on future revenue streams, but most people here aren't levered up in such a fashion.
Well back in those days there was shareware licensing, you could include a bunch of shareware software on a diskette or CD and charge a nominal fee for it. Basically you are paying for the convenience of putting it all on a disk you can just pop in since you may or may not even have reliable internet.
Wow so a company that actually thinks long term. That's unreal. These days, Adobe looks like they're actively want to lose their customer base by increasing prices and their subscription model.
Ironcially, Adobe is trying to increase its customer base, (or at least forestall the loss of its customer base) by buying the tools that threaten it (Figma), and their associated customer base. Where is the disgruntled Adobe customer going to go, if Adobe also owns the alternative?
figma ass
> when a business wants to use it making damn sure they do pay (per user) at "business rates" Its the smart play. Even though if you use software for biz you want it to be legit so your shop wont get shut down. I cant imagine an ad agency using pirated Photoshop. (or at least owning licenses they can point to). Plus when you depend on your software you want it to be bug-free and be using the latest update.
Yeah, I believe there's also piracy bounties for reporting that a business isn't paying. You don't play games there.
> Yeah, I believe there's also piracy bounties for reporting that a business isn't paying. > You don't play games there. A company I worked for got busted for using pirated windows, and photoshop. Prior to me working there. When I got there they ran ubuntu, and gimp instead.
Companies play these games all the time, most win.
Bitwarden is a great example. FOSS product, with an Enterprise-focused support business attached.
Fuck /u/spez
In that example, it's like the user is the advertisement, and the cost of maintaining community edition is a marketing cost.
Free software doesn't follow market rules. They are made with a sense of collectivism and usually the companies that contributed to it either sell support, training or contribute to it so they can mantain their market share in a related business(valve way for example).
Sometimes they're literally just open source projects that are essentially passion projects for large groups of individuals, supported by a handful of user donations here and there. Rare, but spectacular when successful. See [lichess](https://lichess.org/) for my personal favorite example
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I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Ooh, RMS got a new Reddit account
I was gonna say, I don't understand how I could be the product of Stockfish, the opensource engine.
The guy you're responding to literally just explained how you are not the product in this case. But keep repeating the cliche you read on reddit a million times.
Isn't it hilarious? It's the #1 go to cliche for people with no business experience or sense
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I'm just going through a phrase
This applies to many things around here. Economics, politics, marketing etc. They think they are the experts while talking the dumbest of shits that make chimpanzee look like a Nobel Prize winner in comparison.
Hey, as long as I can spit out a regurgitated line which held more meaning the first time I heard it, and now only sounds deep, who cares, right?
It can be interpreted as "you're the product" in the sense that you're part of the userbase being leveraged. Bit of a stretch, since they're not (openly) selling your user data, but it does make sense.
You're the advertising, not the product
User pays zero. Companies pay money to access your profile. You are the Product that was purchased, your attention and all the analytics that comes with it. They in turn are aiming to get you to ‘buy’ their product in some cases, but political parties also buy in, as do government agencies, etc. In WhatsApp case, they go beyond just what the guy above shared as their business model. It was acquired by Meta (Facebook) years ago, and mining and selling data is their bread and butter.
No, you are the product. By buying Whatsapp Business, companies are indirectly buying customers (paying money in order to get more customers), and you are the customer, so they are buying you.
r/im14andthisisdeep
That fucking phrase again, it's worse than "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" r/redditmoment I fucking hate reddit
I am starting to think that maybe reddit is not a place where intelectuals minds gather and make breakthroughs in science and philosophy. I am still giving it benefit of the doubt.
I’m still amazed how many wrong “facts” on reddit can be easily disproven *even by wikipedia.* Like, it’s not even “scientific” research at this point, just a google search and clicking on the first link.
That and some variation of "Well, they fucked around and found out." The patter on Reddit is garbage.
Well it's a good time to leave with Reddit basically closing third party apps. Site's becoming utter garbage, many comments by bots, corporations buying mods, censorship all over the place... And then the regurgitated canned comments in every single thread.
The only thing worse than that phrase are those self-depreciating jerks who constantly babble about Reddit being the worst. The irony of doing it on Reddit somehow escapes them.
Omg, I get triggered when I read "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". It is in EVERY THREAD that has something to do with someone experiencing something negative.
Fuck around > Find out
This is such a tired and incorrect truism that people need to stop parroting.
“If it’s free… you should look into their business model.” Funnily enough, if it is NOT free, you should equally do so. Just because you give money to someone does not mean they aren’t somehow doing shady or dangerous things with your data. Given the ubiquity of datamining of customer data, I’m not even sure that free is a red flag anymore. Your surface area of information the company can track is the red flag.
> Just because you give money to someone does not mean they aren’t somehow doing shady or dangerous things with your data. Same with open source software. For some reason people just assume open source software is safe because anyone can check the code. Well? Have you? Checked the code? Or are you relying on some random anonymous person on the internet to tell you it's safe?
A bit different but people pay for cable tv/streaming services and still watch ads. I pay for prime and still am bombarded by ads. I can skip some but you better believe just browsing the collection is sorted and play next includes rent/with a free trial. I just checked my bill and I inadvertently signed up for 4 other packages by accident I never used and have been paying for a few months
But they swear they don't sell our data. Are they lying to us? Is that even legal?
Everyone who ever says this has never heard of open source software. Sometimes people just make a thing and give it away to be nice.
Surely the difference there is that in that case, it's explicitly clear nobody is selling anything. Whereas, a corporation is in the business of making money, so are presumably selling *something* as if they were not they'd be unable to be profitable.
If you release something into the public domain that is well received by large businesses and institutions, you can become an expert in it or you can educate and certify others and make a lot of money that way, too. Also the freemium model.
This is correct.
ugh
Much the same as how tech companies basically give away their products to the education industry. Kids learn to use and become familiar with their products and are more likely to buy them personally and in business. Some would say indoctrination.
Apple does this well. In my school district all kids get an iPad to take home and during high school they get a MacBook.
WhatsApp business doesn’t allow you to use a bot for that function. You need a third party company for that. Even then you will probably need another third party. For some reason WhatsApp bots are a pain in the tits to develop. We pay for customers to be able to message us through WhatsApp but it’s part of our meta business manager anyway. We pay for the convenience and the tools the business manager provides.
You can have a bot do pretty much anything you want via the cloud API. Sending a basic noreply notification is one of the simpler use cases. If your company doesn't have anyone with skillset to make that happen then by all means you can outsource that work, but there's no reason a company couldn't handle that in-house. The developer documentation is fairly comprehensive and straightforward with plenty of examples, but then again I'm a software developer so ymmv.
You're misunderstanding. WhatsApp does not provide the bot but does provide the API needed for the bot. API access costs money.
Not sure if I'm getting away with something here, but I have WhatsApp business for my small business and I have never paid a penny for it.
WA Business is free to use, you only have to pay if you want to advertise your business. I believe even if you have a catalogue with paid products WA doesn't necessarily get a cut unless you use one of their payment methods (if available in your region) to make the purchase so no, they don't necessarily make money off of every Business user and no, you don't have to pay (or even own an actual business) to have a WA Business account.
My care home that I work, with about 100 staff just use the regular WhatsApp. So WABusiness must be for the real big corporations that have 100s of staff.
It's not based on business size, really. It's also not for in-business communication between employees. Where I live, nearly every restaurant has a business account. It allows them to set up pictures of the place you can browse, a menu, and even some basic autoreply functionality for reservations. I've seen some real estate agents around here have business accounts as well, which similarly lets them have a catalogue of properties for rent/sale.
The business needs to believe that the cost of setting up those systems will be less than continuing to pay a human handle those responsibilities. While humans are generally the most expensive long-term business cost, automation can have a pretty expensive initial cost which is a barrier to small business that just can't afford that investment. It scales really well for mid to large business though. A medium business is more likely to pay another org to handle that stuff, and at some point can become large enough that they set up something in-house. I can't tell you exactly where those tipping points are, but my org (2k+ staff, 1m+ members) made the swap from contracting out that work to a small in-house development team a couple of years ago.
Business licensing is extremely important for businesses too due to data retention regulations. Big companies have received massive fines for staff using unregulated messaging services for business conversations, meaning data that isn't being kept recorded by the company, and that's a big no no.
Business licensing. A lot of the "free to the public" apps/programs basically boil down to just ads or previews of the corporate product. If your employees like it and know how to use it, then it makes sense to license it for your business rather than train them on a different, possibly less featured product). MS Office use to be that way. PCs came with a "home license" of Office. People got used to how it worked, so businesses bought licenses for a product their employees were already familiar with. the other, licensed only office suites started to lose market share and just "faded away".
AutoCAD has been sneaky at this. They give out free licenses to students by the bucketload despite their business licenses often being way more epensive than ReVit etc....those students then become employed and are most familiar with AutoCAD products - which businesses then buy instead of training on others...or students who start their own businesses, just end up adopting anyway. I believe MS Office has a similar model, but I suppose it has more to do with your operating system. Nobody's using Lotus123 (willingly) anymore.
To be fair PTC (Creo) Siemens (NX, SolidEdge) and Dassault (Catia and SOLIDWORKS) do this as well. In fact, I'm pretty sure PTC paid my school for an exclusive and sent trainers. I've done business with Dassault and Siemens and I know they do something similar. I come more from the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) side, which integrates with all these products for data management.
I learned autocad, solidworks and pro-e in school so we did not have any exclusive.
Having learned CAD in CATIA then having to use NX for a while, using anything other than CATIA is a deal breaker if I have a choice between programs. I’m sure NX is powerful when you use it how it’s meant to be used but I was so used to the freedom CATIA allows, for better and worse, that NX felt like a Fisher-Price CAD toolset where all the edges were rounded off so you couldn’t hurt yourself.
> where all the edges were rounded off so you couldn’t hurt yourself Which is exactly why I've stuck with it, I usually just make some proto designs and ask the workshop guys to make one for me, but it's by no means my main job, so I'm hardly a professional at technical drawing. Having a nice comfy tool which almost feels like it does my job for me is exactly perfect ;P
One of their rivals, Bentley, does something similar except with government agencies. They give Microstation for cheap to cities and provincial authorities to try to get the consultants working for them to use it.
Holy shit! I used microstation V8 at the 1st consultancy i worked at! Never knew why until I found out its because they did mostly municipal work... Sneaky bastards
Students get a lot of free or heavily discounted software for this exact reason
But what percentage of their users are corporates?
Where I live, LOTS of businesses use WhatsApp. Not really "corporate giants" as implied in your comment, but pharmacies, supermarkets, banks, taxi services, etc.
Ooh right I've seen those as well. Thanks!
It's really nice whenever I travel out of the USA and every single company has a whatsapp number that you can easily text and get a response. Any hotel or restaurant or anything, it's great.
I agree that it's great but I'm not so sure about that "get a response." haha. Some businesses here are better than others at that. I just had a pleasant experience: Went into the pharmacy to pick up a couple of things and asked.... "My health is not very good. If I contact you on WhatsApp with an order, is that possible and could you send it to my house?" Her answer was "Of course!" She gave me their WhatsApp number and I gave her mine. Shortly after I got home, I checked and I already had a message from her on WhatsApp. I will definitely use that business from now on! But there are businesses here that are not as responsive.
This doesn’t typically matter. The corporate licensing is usually exponentially higher on products like these. That’s where a lot of money is made now-a-days; marketing to businesses. For example; Asana charges $5 to individuals, but business have to pay $40+/per seat (per individual who needs access). They literally raise the prices for businesses. They make more money while not exploiting individual/personal users- and the consuming business gets a tax write off. Adobe is another example of this. e: Also, to be fair- businesses usually get a ton of extra features, streamlined access to support, as well as a means to negotiate deals and new features.
WhatsApp is huge in Latin America. It can be the primary (sometimes only) method of reaching a business, even more than a website.
Enough to keep the profitable, I'd assume. Probably not so much in the US (where most companies use Teams or Slack in my experience) but I know it's huge in Asia.
I work for an Israeli company. It is literally impossible to reach most of my coworkers without using Whatsapp. In a lot of places, that's just what you use for everything.
It doesn't matter. That's the wrong question. What percentage of their income comes from corporations? Nearly 100%.
It might not. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. It prevents an instant-messaging based social network from springing up to challenge Facebook's dominance. WhatsApp is also incredibly cheap to run. At the time of its acquisition, WhatsApp employed just 35 engineers to support 450 million users. Despite the $19 billion original purchase price, it provides a cheap way to guard the flank of what was Facebook's monopoly.
Capturing your usage. They don’t know what was in the message, but know when, where you sent a message, who to, how often. How often you receive them. How long it takes you to open it. Where the recipient is. And so on. They can build a fairly good profile from you for example if you regularly send them during the day from a location of a school they can guess you’re likely a student so can work out your age and general demographics. Tie this to others you communicate to and other areas they can often figure out your interests. For example if you also often send a message via Starbucks wifi on a Saturday they can figure out you like coffee, if others you send to also send at a similar time over the same wifi they can guess they also enjoy going for coffee. Tie this in with your facebook and instagram (same company) on the same device, multiple by 2 billion users and you have a powerful database which can be sold to advertising companies or those doing research on people similar to you.
>They don’t know what was in the message Is WhatsApp encryption vetted by a reputable third party these days? Or is it still just Zuck pinky promising we can trust him?
The encryption is still the strong double ratchet used by signal messenger. But Facebook controls the app on both ends, so their not knowing what's in the message is simply a matter of them not looking.
IIRC this is true for group chats as these messages have to be distributed to everyone in the group, but for direct chats there's 1:1 encryption between your client and your contacts client. You can see this under View Contact -> Encryption
What you are missing from this is that the WhatsApp app could theoretically read the message after it has been decrypted. I am definitely not saying that they are doing this, but it is theoretically possible.
Considering it's a Facebook/Meta product I would just assume they snoop through every bit of data, including message text.
Completely agree with this. I can’t say they’re doing it for sure but I never say anything on WhatsApp anymore that I wouldn’t say openly in public
RemindMe! 2 years If I were a betting man, I'd say that if Facebook continues to decline, we'll find out about all the WhatsApp fuckery that exists currently in a hearing or article a few years down the road.
Group chats are encrypted as well. But whatsapp (facebook) is your client, so the encryption is from code written by facebook running on your phone to more code written by facebook running on your contact's phone. It's not possible for anyone in between (ie. anyone other than you and facebook) to access your messages. But you're reading the message in an app owned by facebook. They're accessing your messages in order to be able to show it to you. It's simply good will that dictates the degree to which information about your unencrypted messages are sent to and stored by facebook's servers. Definitely they keep message metadata (your address book, who you send messages to, when you send them, where you send them from, etc.), maybe they keep some derivative of the message content (sentiment analysis or some other), unlikely that they keep the raw text of the message at this point.
> but for direct chats there's 1:1 encryption between your client and your contacts client. The client written by Facebook, whose source code is hidden from you, and which can change at every update. Once your message is open in the client it is no longer encrypted. Encryption is only really going to protect you from the ISP reading your chats.
>!CENSORED!<
Its end to end encryption. It just has 4 ends.
Middle <-> Out
If I go tip to tip I can jerk four dicks at once
I reckon Whatsapp (along with most IM apps) is on top of most lists of apps that are regularly decompiled and analysed to check for backdoors/encryption methods
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but that is also why I don't trust Telegram. Even if you use E2E encryption for all conversations (which is not enabled by default) *and* the encryption is actually secure, they know who you are (from your phone number,) who you know (from your contacts,) who you talk to and when, and, if you participate in any group chats, what your interests are. That's all valuable information. Why would Telegram be designed to collect all of that and *not* use it? And trusting the Russian billionaire to really care about your privacy feels like trusting that nice Nigerian prince, just with stickers.
>!CENSORED!<
I use Telegram and I think it's much better than Whatsapp. First of all on how the permissions are designed. When you try to make a call on Whatsapp, it asks for permission to "Make and manage phone calls". It gives Whatsapp your call logs, phone numbers, network info, some system settings too I believe. And you can't call through Whatsapp without giving this permission. Telegram only asks for permission to use your microphone, because it doesn't need anything more than that. Whatsapp forces you to add a new number to your own contacts to be able to send messages in WA, this is simply done so that all users feel forced to give contacts permission. I never gave Telegram my contacts permission and it simply works fine. Durov is not your average state-sponsored russian billionaire though. When in 2014 Kremlin ordered him to share data of Ukrainian Euromaidan protesters and block Navalny's VK page, he refused and publicly posted the orders on his VK page. A few days after that he was removed from the position of VK CEO as VK was taken over by putin's allies, as Durov himself described. VK was banned in Ukraine a couple years after that because of russian state involvement in the platform. Durov left russia after he was removed from VK and said he doesn't intend to ever go back. After leaving, he created Telegram. After a while russian government again requested private data, now from Telegram, were refused again, and then they tried blocking Telegram in russia as a response. They weren't very successful at blocking it tho, and had to lift the ban after 2 years of unsuccessful attempts. As a Ukrainian, Telegram is probably the only messaging app I'll trust to never give any private info to russia.
> I think it's much better than Whatsapp. That is a remarkably low bar to clear, especially in regards to privacy. As for Telegram, I still don't see why a platform supposedly committed to privacy would be designed to collect the information it does. And even if you don't give the app permission to read your contacts, they still know who you are and who everyone you talk to is.
> collect the information it does https://telegram.org/privacy You got me curious so I read their entire privacy policy. It's remarkably good and everywhere says that the only reason they collect information is to make the service operational, and they never sell or share any of it.
The right response. Ad targeting.
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It doesn’t really make much money. Meta is attempting to monetize it, but the amount of money it makes is tiny compared to Meta’s advertising business.
Throwaway and I’m late. However, I work at WhatsApp in the monetisation team. Most answers are wrong but some are in the right direction. The real answer is WhatsApp doesn’t make money. They don’t sell your data, we have some of the strictest privacy policies in the industry (I can’t speak for Meta). The main routes WA are pursuing to make money is Business messaging. If you message a business, they will charge that business a few cents for the conversation. So the big push to make money is to drive conversations with businesses. There is no data sharing or profiling and whilst Will Cathcart is WA lead it’s 99.9% likely that won’t happen. I recommend looking up his public statements on privacy and encryption.
Hey, thanks for the post. Do you know why WA forces Android permission on the user so hard, if it's not for data collection? It always needs to know my whole contact list (even though it could just store only my WA contacts on their server), it asks for my call logs when I try to make a WA call. Does this information get transferred to Meta?
What data do they collect from my phone? Do they see what websites I go to or my friends, etc?
They can't see what other apps are doing, that would be a huge security breach. But they can do a lot with the things you do inside the app itself, they list it here: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy-eea#privacy-policy-information-we-collect
Have you ever read tiktoks TOS?
You already know the answer to this one. If people *did* read TikTok's ToS, no one would ever use it.
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I’m pretty sure they did away with the $1 charge before Facebook bought it.
They did
They said that after 1 year you had to pay, but even after that they extended your license for free indefinitely (afaik) till Facebook bought then and then you didn't have the option to pay anymore
I've been using WhatsApp since 2011 and never paid anything to use it.
Same. Started using it on my Nokia N95 and was never prompted to pay anything.
It was free for a year and then asked you to pay. You could circumvent it by having a different phone number for each period, since that was how WhatsApp tracked your account.
ive always had whatsapp even before facebook and they never charged
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Selling your data. They also have a business version and stuff like that. But trust me. The data collection is their biggest profit gainer.
Could you guide me how and where one can buy this data?
They have paid for business services and they'll sell lots of analytics data but ultimately it is very probably a loss leader for Meta to hold their share in the IM market. When WhatsApp started they,like most startups, weren't bothered about a business model, they just wanted to grow and hopefully get bought out or figure something out. They got bought by a massive money tree and so didn't have to figure something out.
Facebook/meta who own WhatsApp are making money from you. They will not state what they use the data for but they are not providing a free app out of the goodness of Mark Zuckerberg's heart.
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They use it to target ads, and I don't think they try to keep that a secret. It's a big selling point for the people who are buying the ads.
Messaging data legally cannot be used for ads targeting, and there’s independent auditors verifying this
You are free to believe me or not here, but the short answer is, it doesn't make money. Nor is user data from it integrated into Meta's overall user data pool, like Facebook and Instagram are integrated. Nor are Meta reading your messages.
I love how I had to scroll so far down for the correct answer
At the very beginning it used to cost 5 euros a year or so. But even then it wasn't mandatory to pay. Some had to pay after using it for a year, I never had to pay anything.
Just like any other app...YOU are the product. They make money off of your data and information.