WhatsApp not that private

Maybe I should move to this Telegram thing. Never installed it nor seen it but the more i see these privacy articles the more i get concerned
 
Can install Telegram, but finding any of your friends using it will be a challenge.
 
From discussion at: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/research_on_the_1.html (surrounding a study on perceptions of service/privacy trade-off). Random quotes from multiple posters:

"The study doesn't suggest that resistance actually is futile, only that a large swath of people believe it is so. The fact is, it's not futile at all, but believing it is and therefore resigning and doing nothing can be a self-fulling prophecy... and THAT's why much of the message around us is pumping up the futility argument, to try to lull us into letting it happen."
Click to expand...

"There is an alternative "behaviour" that some of us follow that was highlighted many many years ago at the end of the film "War Games" which is "Don't Play".
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"'Don't play' isn't good enough nowadays. These services are now so widespread they achieve the blanket surveillance effect of indirect tracking. As long as you are on a buddy's contact list, which he uploaded to big data social, you are being tracked without ever using that service."
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Do you really think true "privacy warriors" (like the majority of people reading this blog) are really going to tell some "anonymous" (bah!) phone survey what they really think of the exchange of personal data for discounts and convenience?

As others have mentioned above, the release of survey results noting that Americans are willing to exchange personal data for those discounts and conveniences is just brainwashing the undecided public into just giving in, and letting it happen to them. I would really like to see more articles letting folks know that they can fight back, or "Not Play" the game.

But people have become accustomed to their freebies, and don't want to lose them, so they'll continue to give in, and just sign on the dotted line.

Yes, I am willing to pay more, and make trips to the ATM, so I can stay off lists, and use cash to prevent a purchasing trail from being compiled on my credit card. (And, after so many news reports of data breaches at the big retailers, I don't trust many of them with my credit card number anyway)
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One thing that isn't overly apparent is how this effects
children. If you grow up in a sea of this stuff how are
you supposed to be able to consider an alternative ?
You've never seen or heard of one, your parents go along
with it even if they disagree. Bernays understood this
and knew he could convince women to smoke quite easily
even though his target was women who had not smoked a
cigarette and did not know anyone who ever had. All it
takes is the appearance to lull the average folk into
compliance. "All your friends are on Facebook, why aren't
you ?"

If you turn off your anti tracking and visit a child
website you'll find at least double the tracking cookies
and advert measuring systems. This is not a coincidence
and it's not a revenue stream to hover over a K-12 kid
like a cloud of vultures. Couple this with the mealy
mouthed Protect the Children loonies, who are afraid
to let a child ever be alone and you can clearly see
the new Orwellian future on the horizon. Nobody seems
to care and nobody wants to talk about it. Society is
all about trust and the paranoid loner model may be
stylish but it won't pave a road or deliver water to
your faucet. In the olde dayes everyone on the Net
was encouraged to save bandwidth, now the whole Net
is full of bandwidth hogging crap building dossiers
for institutions that would prefer to be invisible.

I don't have a definitive answer but we have to be
proactive about forcing institutions and culture to
be trustable or there won't be a future worth living
in. So start somewhere on your own behalf. Pick
any of the invisibles and force them to become the
future you want to live in.

The future is something you make it isn't just what
happens to you.
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NOTE: that final bolded statement is, like most things, a double-edged sword in itself...
 
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Tahir Ally said:
Are you sure no one uses BBM.

This will be an interesting read for you http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/04...medium=social&utm_campaign=bmBBMengagementBBM
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Our client base of about 1000 users 5 years ago was about 75% blackberry users + we had 50 odd BES servers.

Today there are only about 5 die hards still clinging onto their bb for the keyboard and we have 1 BES server left...

It's only my personal xp but I would say a fair representation of mobile business users.

My group of friends is quite small (ie. People I socialise with regularly and see at least once a month) only about 20 ppl in which there isn't a single bb user either.....
 
JStrike said:
They never claimed to be private.
As far as I'm aware, of the major messaging apps, iMessage is the only one that can't be decrypted
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read up on telegram.

only problem I have is that few people use it, well.. only a few of the people in my contact list.
 
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