WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

After facebook bought Whatsapp, friends and family started to look for alternatives. As a N9 / Jolla user I brushed it off. Now boingboing reports that WhatsApp issued take-down notices to several Github repositories.. Among them Wazzaps Github repository. Coderus (tmo) aka tgalal writes on the Hacker News thread: I knew about the grey area that these alternative clients were operating in. What surprises me, thou, is that the takedown notices were apparently issued in the context of the acquisition by the 'hacker' company facebook.

What's your take on this?
icke


P.S.: @Coderus: Can you share someting about your situation and how things evolved?

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

Sooner you start using open messaging protocol the sooner you can end this cat and mouse game. + Do you expect that facebook will respect your privacy?

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

@icke nothing changed for me
@ladoga how much you think about your privacy when using any IM services? everything you dont own not secure 100% but my position is simple: i'm not paranoid. nobody want to get my poor whatsapp/gtalk/etc. data. i'll continue using popular services, because its easy to communicate with. and i'm not an idiot, i'll never send high-private information which can compromize me via public IM services. It's 0.0001% of my messages and i dont care about switching to any other service. i dont care who is whatsapp owner, i'll continue using it because its still comfortable for me.

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

Just a nitpick, coderus =/= tgalal... While both are developers for these 3rd party clients, they are different people :p

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

To be honest, not much. But there are people that value their privacy more than me so it's not only about myself.

In light of recent revelations it seems that organizations like NSA want pretty much all the data they can get their hands on. You might be not directly of interest, but given that they map users contacts after 1 or 2 hops there might be someone that is. For example, maybe some contact of your contact is planning a protest and you get automatically flagged as a suspect.

Claiming above would have been seen as paranoia a year ago, but now it's a simple fact of matters:
http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/...2_-_jacob.html

I think that by taking position of not helping these organizations and govenment agencies to collect user data is a small but useful gesture against ever increasing surveillance. But I also agree that most of this boils down to idealism and serves of little practical purpose for most of us. (I'm not saying that idealism is unimportant though)

There are also more practical reasons. With open protocols you atleast know it will be around and accessible for time being, while with closed stuff you're always at whims of owners. If they close a shop then you have to migrate to the next service. Aside from inconvenience all the stuff you built for now abandoned platform will be mostly useless.

I think those are all good and valid reasons. Everyone makes their own choices.

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

i'm talking about own experience only and not forcing anyone. my im chat history is very poor to compromize anybody :)

Re: WhatsApp - Take-down notices
 

Thanks a lot for the answers. Again, I learnt a lot =b

I cherished the ability to select persons from my contact list to share with WhatsApp or not. So I selected people, were I was pretty sure they already joined and didn't select people were I knew / suspected they cherish their privacy over the 9ct./sms.

Finally a link via the German site wirres.net to pando daily and WhatsApp's take on privacy.

icke