Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram::Meta is considering offering ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram for $14 a month – but only in Europe.
Shit? It works across all platforms, in all countries, unrestricted and unpaid, and thus far, adfree. That’s pretty great, if you ask me.
Its pretty good deal until you consider what facebook gets out of it. Privately owning the primary source of communication that a large chunk of the world uses because its free and convenient will surely have no repercussions to end users later down the line once they end the ‘grow service as quickly as possible at cost’ phase and enter the ‘lets squeeze our users for every penny we can to get back profit and because we know they ll take it since our service is too convenient to give up’ phase.
Oh who am I kidding like anyone who uses whatsapp or any meta owned service cares about things like privacy as long as they get their free communication they are happy as peaches and will take any amount of corpo dicking
It’s end to end encrypted, so they don’t get to see any of my communication. They know who I’m talking to through my metadata, and can probably estimate where in the world I am, but that’s about it.
Sure, Signal would be better, but people are notoriously hard to adapt, so that’s wishful thinking at best.
“today we are announcing that anyone who would like to continue end to end encryption will need to pay an extra 30$ per month” Also im not sure how much I would trust e2e on any meta software there may very well be backdoors that let them get the clear text from either end.
Definitely agree that people are hard to change, especially once they get used to a service they like that is extremely popular. Its a human nature problem, and those don’t have easy solutions. Who knows maybe meta/facebook will screw up sooo badly one day that even the most diehard fan will jump ship but I don’t see that happening. Corpos know just how to push things as far as they can without getting too burned.
WhatsApp can read your messages.
And the metadata’s not encrypted.
Unfortunately, too many hear “encrypted” and assume it’s automatically secure or private no matter what.
Facebook told Gizmodo that WhatsApp can read messages because they’re considered a version of direct messaging between the company and the reporter. They added that users who report content make the conscious choice to share information with Facebook; by their logic, Facebook’s collection of that material doesn’t conflict with end-to-end encryption.
Key words: “thus far”
Facebook wouldn’t have acquired it if they didn’t have plans to squeeze the living soul out of it. In due time. Their hope is that by then, all alternatives will be wiped out, and with it being so integrated as a daily driver, we’ll be paying a subscription, with no E2EE, sharing metadata (which btw is sometimes more valuable than the content of your messages) unwillingly.
What’s funny/crazy too is that all the top execs (including Zuck himself) use Signal. That’s the irony of the digital world we live in: the closer you are to these technologies, the more you learn, and the less subjected to it you actually wanna be.
Zuck uses Signal: https://mashable.com/article/zuckerberg-on-signal
Linda Yaccarino uses Signal (but not Twitter 🤣): https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/28/x-ceo-iphone-home-screen-x-isnt-there/
Other names are blanking right now off the top, but in The Social Dilemma, the engineers and ex-execs talk about not allowing their family members (especially kids) to be on the platforms they themselves built. I specifically remember an Instagram engineer (Bailey?) and a VP/president of Pinterest.
