I talk to my friends, parents, and family about it a lot. They don't understand it, but they do care. Problem is that they don't understand how to fight back. They do not want to give up on Facebook. They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there." So I think they care, but there's a big sense of helplessness. Honestly that's why I like projects like Signal. There's no way I can get people to use PGP through emails, it is too much work. But anyone can use something like Signal.
> They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there."
I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to stop short of asking people to switch, and just try to get them to install it (and maybe even get them to casually suggest their friends do the same, if the opportunity arises). It's a hopefully small, risk-free step to take, and the more people that have installs, the more likely it is that "no one is there" will start becoming not true, even if not immediately.
I work in tech and I don't know a single person on Signal. It was already hard enough to get my family to start using WhatsApp over the years, and I still get messages from some of them over Skype(!!!!) for some reason. Frankly, I have no strength for yet another switch, I'm staying with WhatsApp for the time being.
Your mileage clearly varies. Like many people here, I also work in tech. Even before the WhatsApp privacy policy fiasco, there were a good few dozens of my contacts on Signal. Afterwards, there was a push like I haven't seen in all the years I've been using it.
Like many people, I'd definitely prefer having just one messenger, but now I simply use Signal with everyone that's on it and only have to open WhatsApp a few times a week. This entire thing has to be seen as a process IMO.
Pidgin with a shitton of plugins. If the only problem is the migration, that still works as a single client, albeit with drawbacks and hiccups. (I collected them at https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins and yes, it'll need to be compiled, even Pidgin itself for some of the solutions. There's nothing user friendly about it, sadly.)
On the other hand... the only system I never had to migrate off is IRC. The funny bit of IRC is that it's not private in terms of security at all, but because it's anonymus, it still feels like it.
And so I keep thinking about needs when it comes to privacy: what do I really need in the context of internet communication? Anonymity, privacy, or both?
I got my parents to install Signal a while ago, now in the recent 2-3 months their Signal contact lists have at least doubled when Signal got an unexpected boost by WhatsApp's privacy PR nightmare. I don't expect things to change much, though.
Because in the end normal users think about the functionality and price first, everything else second. Privacy? Just a neat-sounding bonus you can feel good about if your favorite app includes it and don't care about if it doesn't.
Their reasons are completely valid honestly. There's nothing that feels like you have no power than using a chat app with none of your friends on it.
Only way to really take power back is make an app better than what's on the market, and have it respect your privacy. A very, very tall order, but I think it's the only way we can really take power away from big tech and give it back to the people.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not trying to say that their concerns are invalid. They very much are valid.
I don't think you can win by just having a better app. Marketing plays a big role. So something like Signal is going to be a major underdog because OSS and freeware don't have the same cashflow to do marketing. What I'm trying to say is that we need to be that marketing. Talking about data and privacy _is_ that marketing.
Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.
- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters
- opening Signal displays empty frame far too long
- it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls
- forwarding message from chat to chat is not working
- messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.
And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.
A distinction without a difference. It matters little how much they say they care if the few taps to download a new app and some nonsense "but what if my friends list isn't totally full, the horror!" fear is what's stopping them, especially when they clearly know someone who can and is willing to help them (ie. you).
I wonder how quickly they would switch if WhatsApp started requiring a monthly fee to use it. I get the feeling that big sense of helplessness would suddenly vanish.
If they claim to care so much about online data privacy, let them prove it. They've already proven they care a lot about price.
Your view of the average user is unnecessarily uncharitable and antagonistic. People want privacy, but they also want to talk to their friends: that much is given. But…to basically any normal user, an app that offers privacy but doesn't let them talk to their friends is useless. Not everyone has the time or ability to go around proselytizing their acquaintances to switch to a new app to talk to them. To be honest, a lot barely have the time to figure out how to use a new app…
So how did they start using chatting to their friends with their current chat service in the first place? By that logic, few people would ever leave IRC or Skype or whatever they started using first. Users move, they just don't move for privacy. The fact that proselytization is even required to move to Signal is telling.
Everyone has time and ability to make their own choices with like-minded friends. They do it for everything else, that's how they started using WhatsApp and co in the first place. Their claims to caring about privacy are as convincing as a friend who keeps telling you "sorry, I'm too busy", "another time then?", "maybe", repeated ad nauseam. Then you see them at another party with someone else confusingly named "WhatsApp" and you realize they just couldn't make time for you, who is named "Signal".
Again, look at how quickly users switch when a service requires payment (IIRC WhatsApp did try to do this once and a lot of users chose to leave instead of paying). They're just too busy & helpless, right? How much proselytization did that take?
Whatsapp built its userbase over several years. It did so at a time where it had a clear value prop, replacing sms which cost a lot with something nearly free. It grew in popularity in eastern european countries, spread later in europe and then later in the US when Facebook acquired them.
This was a process, not a 1-day switch from skype to whatsapp. The network effects are real, and if you don't understand how difficult it is to get people to join a chat app, you won't win.
The network effects were real for SMS too, yet users still moved to WhatsApp because it was free (much to the chagrin of incumbent carriers), that's what users wanted.
Of course it's difficult to get people to join a chat app, and it should be. At a minimum you should need to provide something that users want and didn't have before. WhatsApp offered something new, it was an effective price tag of zero with phone number contacts. Skype offered something new and desirable (until it didn't). Snapchat offered something new and desirable. All of them had predecessors with network effects and still succeeded by giving users something they really wanted. They didn't throw their hands up and blame users.
Signal offers nothing new to users right now. "Privacy" is too abstract. E2EE? The few users who know what that is tend to know that Whatsapp already has it. In fact, those shitty crypto payments might be the only thing Signal does offer to users. But you also lose out on chat syncing for example.
Surprisingly though, Signal is gaining a bit of traction, so I think "Privacy" is still something people do want. But it has to be better defined.
And to be completely honest I don't believe in Signal. The current messenger wars kind of feel like a parallel universe's email wars "yahoo vs gmail vs hotmail vs live" or something. Coming up with a new messenger is easy. Most of them have the same featuresets. The underlying protocols should be compatible instead of this sorry state of affairs.
Matrix will probably win out in the end but it's going to be long-drawn and unnecessarily annoying for users in the mean time. It shouldn't matter if you're using instagram's UI, or messenger's, or signal's, …. You should get access to the contacts you want, and be able to cross-talk.
It's interesting how people turn into such app misers when it comes to messengers. It's upsetting to have multiple different ones, even though they don't eat up disk space.
Some are very loyal to the Zuckerberg offerings. They ride or die with the Zuckster.
Which is why privacy protection has to come from the top (i.e. regulators), because most people don't know and/or don't care.
"we" care, up to the point of "it's too much effort", and "we" have tried to do a grassroots movement to get people to use more privacy-focused apps.
But these apps, in the end, are still owned by companies who are not charities; they want to earn money, and digitally, it feels like you can only make money by selling subscriptions, ads, or printing a cryptocurrency - and subscriptions don't work because of (sponsored / investor funded) free alternatives.
Anyway, if you put legislation in place like in Europe, the companies will have no choice. In theory anyway; in practice they find and abuse loopholes soon enough, or just do things covertly, hope they won't be found out, and just pay the fine if something does come up. Which they can easily afford by then, not so much from the money they earn from their monetization method, but stock market value.
Some HN readers like me also don’t think about privacy much at all.
I like the sites and apps that accept my data as currency so that I can use/browse them without getting out my wallet. Plus I like seeing ads for products that I might want to buy. Win win.
