This Was WhatsApp’s Plan All Along - Gizmodo Australia
This Was WhatsApp’s Plan All Along - Gizmodo Australia |
- This Was WhatsApp’s Plan All Along - Gizmodo Australia
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- Asians dump WhatsApp for Signal and Telegram on privacy concerns - KrASIA
| This Was WhatsApp’s Plan All Along - Gizmodo Australia Posted: 15 Jan 2021 02:30 PM PST Even if you aren't the type of person who peruses WhatsApp on a regular basis, chances are you've tried perusing its new privacy policy. Emphasis on "tried." The roughly 4,000-word tome fell under fire from countless WhatsAppers across the globe after the company told its users that they'll be ejected from the platform unless they abide by these new terms. Some eagle-eyed critics quickly noticed that buried under the rest of the usual slop that comes with your average privacy policy, it seemed like the new terms mandated that WhatsApp now had the right to share supposedly personal data — like phone numbers or payment info — with its parent company, Facebook, along with fellow subsidiary Instagram. Naturally, people lost it. Over the past week, tens of millions of people have apparently flooded off of WhatsApp and onto rival messaging platforms like Signal and Telegram. Elon Musk weighed in, as did Edward Snowden. Turkish authorities opened a probe into WhatsApp's data-sharing practices, followed by Italy's regional data authority doing the same. On Thursday, authorities in India, WhatsApp's biggest market, filed a petition alleging that the new terms weren't only a threat to personal privacy, but to national security as well. What became very clear very quickly is that, while everyone agreed on being outraged, there was a bit of fuzziness on what they agreed to be outraged about.
The confusion was the natural result of WhatsApp's bungled rollout of these new policies. By shoving a scary-sounding ultimatum in front of countless users, and by tying that ultimatum to a privacy policy that (I think we can all agree) is near-impossible to comprehend, the bulk of WhatsApp's users were left assuming the worst: that Facebook could now read their WhatsApp messages, snoop through their entire contact list, and know every time you leave someone on "read" within the app. These rumours eventually reached WhatsApp Head Will Cathcart, who issued his own lengthy Twitter thread debunking the bulk of these claims, before WhatsApp proper did its own debunking in the form of an FAQ page. In a shocking turn of events, WhatsApp's attempt to set its own tarnished record straight was regarded as bullshit by its more vocal critics. And honestly, they had a point: This is WhatsApp we're talking about. When an encrypted chat platform that's been widely praised by people in the privacy and security space very rudely announces it'll be sharing your data — any data — with a company like Facebook, you can understand why that would raise some hackles. The thing is, in the years since WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton cut ties with Facebook for, well, being Facebook, the company slowly turned into something that acted more like its fellow Facebook properties: an app that's kind of about socialising, but mostly about shopping. These new privacy policies are just WhatsApp's — and Facebook's — way of finally saying the quiet part out loud. I Don't Have All Day, Gimme The Short VersionIf you're also the type of person that solely uses WhatsApp to message friends, family, and the occasional petsitter, nothing's changing on the privacy front. In fact, what we think of when we talk about our "privacy" on WhatsApp has been largely unchanged since mid-2016, when the company first announced that WhatsApp would start sharing some of your basic metadata like your phone number and a grab-bag of "anonymous" identifiers unless you manually opted out. (Facebook ended up pulling the opt-out button pretty soon after, but that's another story entirely). Not too long ago, an anonymous developer reverse engineered the entire WhatsApp web app, and their findings are freely scannable through their GitHub. In a nutshell, if I messaged a petsitter after the 2016 updates, Facebook might be able to suss out my phone's make and model, along with how dangerously low on juice my phone might be — but those pet-sitting conversations are entirely encrypted. None of that's changing now. That said, if you live in a country like India or Brazil where WhatsApp isn't only a chatting app, but a chatting app for brands and businesses to reach their clientele, things are a bit different. Unlike the aforementioned pet-sitting conversation, chances are any conversations you might have with a given company aren't only unencrypted, but they're shared with way more parties than you might think. WhatsApp's privacy policy might be new to most of us, but this particular practice has already been the platform's MO for years. The WhatsApp You Know And The WhatsApp You Don'tThe backstory that led up to WhatsApp's bungled announcements actually started around the same time Koum jumped ship from the platform that was earning him frankly grotesque amounts of cash. A few months later, WhatsApp quietly rolled out a new business-facing product that promised to milk even more revenue out of the multi-billion-dollar platform: the "WhatsApp Business API." As the name suggests, the Business API was geared towards businesses: airlines that want to use WhatsApp to send boarding passes, for example, or a grocery chain that wants to use WhatsApp to let someone know their order is out for delivery. These messages weren't meant to be promotional the way, say, an ad on Instagram might be; they were meant to be transactional — kind of like a conversation you have with a store clerk when looking for shoes in your size. If the business in question answered a given inquiry within a one-day window, Facebook let them send their response free of charge. Any message sent after the initial 24 hours comes saddled with a tiny fee — ranging anywhere from a fraction of a fraction of a cent to a few cents per message, depending on which third parties might be involved and the country a given brand is targeting. This fee gets divvied up by those parties, and–of course — by WhatsApp. While a few outlets covered this burgeoning product as something like Facebook's answer to the "customer support" emails and texts from days of yore, it went pretty much unnoticed by most outlets that (rightfully) saw the API as a pretty boring piece of adtech. Brands, on the other hand, couldn't be more jazzed about the idea, and they kept on being jazzed while WhatsApp adopted new features meant to make it more commerce-friendly. By 2020, WhatsAppers based in India weren't only using WhatsApp to talk to their pet sitters — they were scrolling through WhatsApp-specific catalogues for new shoes, plunking their selected pair into a WhatsApp-specific cart, and then using a WhatsApp-specific payment processor to pay for their new kicks before following up with WhatApp to make sure their order arrived on time. More brand appeal means more brands are flocking to plug into this API. In 2018, WhatsApp initially opened access to the new platform to roughly 100 hand-picked partners, like Netflix, Uber, and a few hotels and banks in regions where WhatsApp is the SMS platform of choice. Some analysts estimated that a year later, the number of enterprises plugged into the API went from 100 to roughly 1,000. At its current rate, the team said, WhatsApp is on track to get close to 55,000 businesses using this API by the end of 2024, all collectively racking up a hefty $US3.6 ($5) billion in messaging fees. The thing is, it's really hard to goad a brand to drop that kind of cash on your product when they can't even read what their customers are saying because, again, WhatsApp's chats are encrypted by default. This was one of the sticking points that ultimately led to Koum's exit, according to the Washington Post: Facebook wanted to turn WhatsApp into a business-friendly platform, and WhatsApp's team fired back that they couldn't build that platform without weakening WhatsApp's native encryption in some way. They were right. But Facebook — again, being Facebook — didn't really seem too bothered by the idea of baking a brand-sized loophole into an encrypted platform. But to trace this back which policy change ended up biting WhatsApp in the arse the most when it rolled out these new policies, you could say some of the creepiest parts actually stem from this one decision. We reached out to Facebook regarding its changes and will update when we hear back. What We Talk About When We Talk About EncryptionWhen the sea of internet outrage reached a critical mass on Twitter dot com, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted out that he was seeing "a lot of misinformation" about WhatsApp's new terms of service. The changes people were reading were strictly related to messaging businesses on WhatsApp, which, as he reminded people, is always optional. He then linked to WhatsApp's own FAQ on the subject, which included another mealy-mouthed explanation of how, exactly, businesses use your WhatsApp data. In reality, though, it doesn't really say much of anything: it doesn't touch on the exact data that these partners are hoovering up from a (supposedly) encrypted platform, nor does it even discuss what "changes" in the privacy policy specifically apply to business-based messaging. So instead of parsing apart… all of that, let's go straight to the source. The Business API's source code is actually easily searchable on Facebook's dev-facing site, which means you can also find the data points this API hoovers from WhatsApp proper, and how it could — at least potentially — bypass WhatsApp's encryption to do so. Or if you want, you can just visit this surprisingly cogent FAQ that literally asks "Is end-to-end encryption maintained through the WhatsApp Business API?." WhatsApp's response, which we emphasised here is just… something (emphasis ours):
Or put another way, WhatsApp's telling us that when we have conversations with the business or brand on the platform — and that business or brand happens to be working with a given number of third parties — the encrypted WhatsApp we're used to using goes out the window. I should probably clarify who these third parties actually are. Facebook calls them Business Solution Providers, (or BSP's for short), and they're essentially an approved set of adtech vendors whose sole responsibility is making marketing on Facebook as easy an experience as possible. If you're advertising a hip new line of CBD gummies and only want to reach, say, dog mums on Instagram between 18 and 21 that live in the U.S. but exclusively speak Portuguese at home, there are a few dozen BSP's that Facebook can match you up with. If you want to reach them on other Facebook properties — like, say, Whatsapp — there are 66 partners that Facebook lists off as having the key to its Business API. Even if you can't get your hands on it, Facebook's essentially promising that your ads will be safe in these third-party players' hands if you promise to give them a little monetary something-something. The encryption-busting manoeuvre these BSP's are allowed to do is, as always, openly available, courtesy of Facebook. If your brain hasn't smoothed over reading about this API until now, I'd recommend flipping through those docs. For my fellow smooth-brainers, here's the basic gist: When a BSP or any Facebook-approved partner downloads the Business API, it comes packaged with a port that directs data from WhatsApp conversations onto an external database that this partner controls. When that partner gets buddied up with, say, a pizza place that wants to use WhatsApp for customer support, every message that they get asking about the status of their slice ends up in this unencrypted bucket, along with a slew of contact info about the person who put that request in.  Once that data's under a third-party's purview, ultimately it's no longer Facebook's responsibility, even if it's used to target ads on one of the company's own platforms. WhatsApp cheerfully described this setup in yet another FAQ (emphasis ours again):
In other words, if I'm using WhatsApp to ask this imaginary pizza place why my eggplant parm and diet coke haven't gotten to my apartment yet, whatever data falls out of that conversation could be used to target me with more ads for parm and parm-adjacent products just about anywhere that pizza place's trusted partner is able to do so. It's just a happy coincidence if that means advertising on Facebook. So just to recap, what WhatsApp (ok, mostly Facebook) is saying at this point is:
On one hand, I don't really blame WhatsApp for flubbing this announcement. Like all things in adtech, explaining the specifics of WhatsApp's Business API — or any of its specific data-sharing practices — is a mind-numbingly dull exercise that almost certainly couldn't fit onto people's lil phone screens. But by ignoring a lot of these nuances, the company's left with hordes of people that filled this update with their own theories about what these seemingly sweeping privacy changes actually mean. There's got to be a happy medium somewhere. Until Facebook's execs find where that is, they're going to be left posting harried Twitter clips citing the same vapid privacy promises we've been seeing from the company until now. But if the WhatsApp debacle should teach us anything, it's that peeling away at these platitudes can leave you with something deep rooted and disturbing — and sometimes, older than you'd think.  |
| Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra unboxing, first impressions - TechnoCodex Posted: 16 Jan 2021 12:38 AM PST  By: Tech Desk | New Delhi | Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra unboxing (Image credit: Nandagopal Rajan/Express photo) © IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd  |
| Vergecast: CES 2021 and Samsung’s S21 lineup - TechnoCodex Posted: 16 Jan 2021 12:25 AM PST  Related Posts This year's Consumer Electronics Show was unsurprisingly all virtual. Typically, The Verge is in the thick of it in Las Vegas, but this year, we're all at our respective homes — so that means our podcast The Vergecast is as well. The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Monica Chin, and Chris Welch dive into all of the important announcements from both inside and outside of CES — including Samsung's new flagship S21 smartphone line, the many new TVs with HDMI 2.1, Mini LED, webOS, and the next laptops with new chips from Intel and AMD. There's a whole lot more covered in this episode (as you can see from the links below), so listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear it all. Further reading:
Continue reading…  |
| Asians dump WhatsApp for Signal and Telegram on privacy concerns - KrASIA Posted: 15 Jan 2021 12:15 AM PST A theme has been trending on social media over the past week in Hong Kong, which has come increasingly under the watchful eye of Beijing after a national security law imposed on the territory last year. "We made it from ICQ to MSN, from MSN to WhatsApp. It's not that hard to switch to another app!" The line refers to popular instant messaging tools that have come and gone over past 20 years. It is an indication that people in the city have joined social media users around the globe in a shift to other messaging platforms because of concerns over privacy, after WhatsApp dismayed many users by rewriting its terms of use on Jan. 6. The new terms will essentially allow Facebook, WhatsApp's owner, to gain access to certain personal information, such as contact lists, location, financial information, and usage data. Since then, WhatsApp's rivals have seen a record-breaking amount of downloads. Signal, a private messaging app, logged 7.5 million downloads globally between Jan. 6 and Jan. 10 following endorsements from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. That marks a 43-fold increase from the previous week, according to Sensor Tower, an app-analytics company.
Another messaging app, Telegram, said it amassed more than 25 million new users around the world between Jan. 10 and Jan. 12, helping it surpass 500 million active users — compared with WhatsApp's 2 billion monthly active users as of February last year. Despite reassurances from WhatsApp that the company does not, and cannot, access private conversations as they are automatically encrypted end-to-end, it has failed to halt the mass migration. Signal and Telegram have topped both Apple and Google's app stores in several countries over the past week, including the US, several European nations, and Asian countries where WhatsApp is the dominant messenger. "After seeing the long list of personal data declarations from WhatsApp, I decided to shift [to] Signal in order to protect my privacy," said Kwok Ka-wing, chairman of the Hong Kong Financial Industry Employees General Union, adding that he is wary of the overreaching control of Big Tech companies. Kwok is among the scores of activists, scholars, and celebrities in Hong Kong who called for people to abandon WhatsApp, which is used by close to 80% of the city's population. Awareness for data privacy and security has grown in the financial hub following the widespread anti-government protests in 2019, when protesters used anonymous messaging apps to avoid police surveillance. "The migration to Signal reflects growing concerns with privacy and security more in general and losing trust in WhatsApp, and Facebook, more specifically," said Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who specializes in privacy and online communications. "Facebook promised it would not force WhatsApp to share data with them when they bought WhatsApp," he said. "They have broken that promise." Tsui added that Signal, a nonprofit app that collects only the absolute necessary metadata, made it stand out in an increasingly crowded app field. Signal is supported by donations, including a USD 50 million loan from its co-founder Brian Acton, who also helped create WhatsApp and has long been an advocate for data privacy.
To bring more people to Signal, Fiona Wong, 26, a graphic designer in Hong Kong, has contributed to a public database that makes WhatsApp stickers usable on Signal. "I hope this will provide more incentive for my friends and other people to migrate," she said. "At the end of the day, the success of a messaging app only hinges on whether people around you are actively using it," she said. WhatsApp's new privacy rules are aimed at facilitating advertisement placement on other Facebook-owned platforms. This allows Facebook to monetize the free messaging service that it acquired for USD 19 billion in 2014. Users who refuse to agree to the new terms that start Feb. 8 can only use limited functions afterward. Hong Kong's privacy watchdog has urged WhatsApp to delay the deadline and to "provide practical alternatives" for those who do not agree to the new terms to continue to use the service. For now, Europe is the only region in the world where WhatsApp's new privacy terms do not apply, as the European Union's stringent privacy laws empowered authorities to fine companies as much as 4% of global annual revenue if they run afoul of regulations. Yet in India, WhatsApp's largest single market with a strong 400-million user base, some analysts believe it will not be affected in a major way despite the exodus being reported elsewhere. "There will always be the more upwardly mobile, the more privacy-educated sort of strata of people which will move [to other apps], obviously, but we are not talking about two million users here," Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst, founder and CEO of Greyhound Research, told Nikkei Asia. "Even those two million, by the way, are not moving out of WhatsApp completely and moving in to, let's say, Signal or Telegram. They are adding on to it," he said. "WhatsApp has committed itself to India in a very big way and essentially established the ecosystem of content players, of commerce players around it which allows it to thrive in the country," Gogia said. "Purely from that perspective, neither Signal nor Telegram has made any visible commitment to the country at all." Indeed, WhatsApp is commonly used by businesses in Asia to communicate with customers with many having chatbots tailored to the app. The company launched WhatsApp Business in early 2018 and has entered the payments realm in its two largest markets, India and Brazil. Neha Bhatnagar, 40, a corporate communication professional in the Indian capital, said people in her contact list have started downloading Signal and Telegram in the past few days while remaining active on WhatsApp. "I myself joined Signal on Monday just to see how many people I know are now on it and found that about 100 of more than 1,050 contacts in my phone had added Signal. But all my personal and official groups are still on WhatsApp and I intend to keep using the app," she said, adding, "Why should I switch over? Data on your phone and laptop is already compromised [or] leaked whichever app you are using. There's nothing called, 'privacy.'" Gogia, however, said privacy is a very personal concept. "What may be very private to you, may not be private to me." He also noted that sensitivity to privacy in India is lower than in other Asian countries. Digital messaging users in Singapore also have increasingly adopted rival platforms to WhatsApp, such as Telegram, even before WhatsApp announced its updated terms of service. But WhatsApp remains widely used. In a report published in February last year, data analysis platform DataReportal noted that 81% of internet users aged 16 to 64 in a survey said they used WhatsApp. Su Lian Jye, principal analyst at technology analysis company ABI Research, said he has not observed an exodus from WhatsApp in Singapore. "I think the prevailing attitudes that make WhatsApp sticky in Singapore are in the strength of WhatsApp's branding, the ease of use and simplicity," he said. "In the West, privacy and personal data protection are the main concerns. People are actively seeking out tools and solutions that prioritize these aspects." There are those in the city-state, however, who are looking to leave WhatsApp. Justin Kan, 37, a financial adviser, has downloaded Telegram and Signal to supplement his use of the Facebook-owned messaging platform. But Kan acknowledges he has been unable to completely ditch WhatsApp because most of his contacts are still using the platform, with fewer than 30 contacts on Signal. "I still have to use WhatsApp," Kan said. "But lately, I have been seeing more and more people joining Signal and Telegram, which is encouraging. This means that many people are also starting to see the impact that apps like WhatsApp have on our privacy." Similarly, Wong in Hong Kong admits that she cannot quit all Facebook-owned platforms overnight despite privacy concerns, given the lack of good alternatives. "But if the WhatsApp migration can sustain, it will motivate more privacy-conscious companies to vie with Facebook and Instagram and provide users with more options," she said. This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It's republished here as part of 36Kr's ongoing partnership with Nikkei.  |
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