SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
Signal will soon be your one stop solution for all your chat apps
Fixed that for you.
Why is this being presented as “whatsapp will be the one and only” instead of “whatsapp won’t be the only option”? The DMA will users to install nearly any chat app and chat with users from another chat app.
Where are you getting “the one and only” from? Are you misinterpreting “one-stop solution”?
The fact that iMessage got the exemptions underpins the entire act. I would any day switch to Signal, if there is 1:1 interoperability b/w the platforms.
@TheMadnessKing @floppy in Europe for most people iMessage is just the SMS app. Even though it pisses me off that Apple got away with it, having WhatsApp to comply with this is just huge. Everyone here uses WhatsApp, and now I won’t be forced to leave Signal anymore.
iMessage is not considered a gatekeeper in Europe because pretty much nobody uses it. That’s why it’s extempted.
Apple just claimed an exception. It’s still up to the EU to determine whether it is actually exempt or not.
No it won’t.
My sister was angered when I quit whatsapp (and facebook), asking me reasons why and if it was because I didn’t like her. Told her I like my privacy. Haven’t heard of her and a lot of other family since who only like to communicate through social media. Good.
I like SMS and Signal, only people that care for me are using that because I asked them to.
I’m there with you on the ideals, after all here I am on Lemmy (and mastodon fwiw) with Reddit and TwitterX deleted.
But, everybody I am close to in everyday life is a normie for lack of a better term. I don’t have to use Facebook regularly, for example, but there is a practical value to just having it available and checking notifications from time to time.
Kind of like how I’m looking through some code in Linux at work today, but it’s running in a VM on my Microsoft/O365 equipped PC. Much like with Facebook, factors outside my control necessitate using it, so I accept it without stressing myself.
I’m not trying to argue or convince you to change your ways though! FLOSS and privacy need awareness and advocacy, and therefore need strong outspoken supporters!
Not to burst your bubble but SMS is even less secure than WhatsApp. In fact, SMS is among the least secure communication avenues on a phone, since your telecommunications provider has the ability to keep logs of what you send, when you send it and to whom you send it to.
Not to mention how insecure 4G is and how easy it is to intercept other people’s messages
Cool so I can decide to use Signal for privacy reasons and if the other party uses WhatsApp all my chats with them are read by Meta? What is the point?
No, it’s still E2EE. Meta can’t read it as far as anyone knows. Meta will know that the other person has you in their contacts (they already know this) and that they are messaging you, that’s it.
Meta writes the software that runs on the other end, and it’s closed source. Therefore for all we know, the message is end-to-end encrypted, and the moment it is decrypted on the other end Meta can send it back to their servers or use it for advertising. Unless the client at the end is open source and audited, E2E doesn’t mean much imo
Well, I think you’re the only one who thinks that E2EE doesn’t mean much.
That’s not it. It’s E2EE but Meta gathers all the metadata from Whatsapp including who you contact, when, where, how large the messages are, what times you’re online and for how long, phone numbers, names etc. That’s plenty of info to create a profile on users and their connections with each other, as is Facebook’s MO.
The point is that people can switch their apps one by one, not losing any contacts in the way, instead of trying to convience all your friends to install new app at once.
