As someone who knows Facebook and as an ex-Whatsapp user, the FTC are hilariously attempting to bully Facebook into not monetising their purchase of Whatsapp for $19 Billion.
Does Anyone At All Think This Will Work?
They paid $19 Billion! Not monetise it? Are they nuts?
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FTC as Blindly Optimistic as Anyone Else
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(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:44AM
Run don't walk away from whatsapp, the results are not going to be pretty!
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LookIntoTheFuture on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:52AM
OK, well, government regulators shouldn't approve the $19 billion acquisition then. Am I missing something?
(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:58AM
Bribes, lots of bribes.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:02AM
Yeah, you're right. Well, I had a nice 8 seconds of the world I wished I lived in.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 27 2014, @06:58AM
We call that "lobbying" here in America.
(Score: 2) by Bartman12345 on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:00AM
Facebook really have WhatsApp users over a barrel. I mean, apart from Kik, WeChat, LINE, Viber, and about 20 other similar products, WhatsApp users are totally locked in.
(Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Sunday April 27 2014, @03:50AM
Assuming you're being sarcastic, there actually is a huge amount of lock in with IM programs because you need to convince all of your friends to switch.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday April 27 2014, @06:29AM
And millions upon millions of AIM users will back you up on that.
(Score: 1) by Nikker on Sunday April 27 2014, @08:58AM
All FB has to do is copy the users / passwords from WhatsApp and ditch the UI, or am I just missing something?
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Sunday April 27 2014, @08:05AM
So, which alternative would you recommend?
Requirements:
* some existing user base, as an indication for viability and scalability.
* android 2.x support.
* no insecure (i.e. subpoena-able) storage of messages on servers.
* no ads or data mining or other creepy stuff.
* limited cost (0.75 EUR/yr like Whatsapp is OK).
* encrypted message transport.
Telegram seemed to fit the bill at first, but the criticism by crypto experts on the implementation (see references on wikipedia) makes me uncomfortable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#S ecurity_concerns [wikipedia.org]
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2) by Bartman12345 on Sunday April 27 2014, @08:36AM
I don't have a recommendation for you, but for the record I'm just sticking with WhatsApp, for now at least. I only use it to communicate with my wife, and it works well for both text and voice messages between my Windows Phone and her iPhone.
We are both aware of the Facebook buyout, and would not use WhatsApp for anything we considered private information. If Zuckerberg wants to try and target advertising at me on the basis of messages such as "Home late tonight" or "Can you pick up some milk on your way home" then good luck to him.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:08PM
> If Zuckerberg wants to try and target advertising at me on the basis of messages such as
> "Home late tonight" or "Can you pick up some milk on your way home" then good luck to him.
Actually, that's exactly the kind of stuff they are looking for. They get an idea of your schedule - which helps them map out if you are dual-income or single-income or unemployed, they get an idea of your shopping lists which tells them all kinds of stuff about your family, like if you might have kids, your religion, ethnicity, etc. The key to remember is that the information does not have to be black and white, they work on probabilities and every single drop of information increases the accuracy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hankwang on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:07PM
One of the bits of private information is your contact list. Whatsapp takes all phone numbers from your contact list and therefore knows which accounts are related to which other accounts. Whatsapp promised that they wouldn't do anything with that information other than ensuring that every user can see which known contacts can be reached using Whatsapp. I accepted that, but I wouldn't want Facebook-Whatsapp to use this data for building profiles of users.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2) by Bartman12345 on Sunday April 27 2014, @02:47PM
Well... actually that's a pretty good point. Since I only use WhatsApp with one of my contacts it would not be an issue to move to a different app, but it would have to work on both our phones and ideally be as capable and reliable as WhatsApp.
Guess it's time to do some research...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pe1rxq on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:34PM
Thanks for giving me the chance to shamelessly plug my own app now....
It's called QuickMSG and you can find it at my own website: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/ [vreeken.net] or in f-droid: http://f-droid.org/ [f-droid.org] and in the SlideMe market.
As for your requirements:
* some existing user base, as an indication for viability and scalability.
Userbase is still small, but you don't have to be afraid of scalability, the existing e-mail infrastructure already handles huge amounts of spam.
* android 2.x support.
Is 2.2 good enough?
* no insecure (i.e. subpoena-able) storage of messages on servers.
All encryption is done end-to-end.
* no ads or data mining or other creepy stuff.
Nope, nothing and you can check the source to make sure I am not lying.
* limited cost (0.75 EUR/yr like Whatsapp is OK).
Free, but you may pay me wathever you want.
* encrypted message transport.
Yes, PGP
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hankwang on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:36PM
I just had a look at the QuickMSG website, but I think I'll pass on this one, for now. That's because it is not available through Google Play (and apparently someone is squatting your app name), because of "Current status: very beta, probably won't eat your phone", because it's a bit of a hassle to setup new SMTP/IMAP-capable email accounts just for this app.
Also it's not clear what the latency is going to be. Whatsapp manages to allow real-time conversations as long as the app is active, and updates are usually pretty fast when it's running in the background. All this it does without too much battery drain thanks to 'push' communication. I don't see polling an IMAP server every 5 seconds as being very friendly to the battery lifetime. Or is it using IMAP IDLE/Push-IMAP? No idea how widespread these are nowadays, I don't use IMAP.
I admit that my objections were not in my requirements list. :)
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pe1rxq on Sunday April 27 2014, @07:37PM
No problem.
Google Play will probably stay a problem for a while.
You can use an existing account for it though. The app will only downloand quickmsg messages.
Latency is generally within seconds. It mostly depends on how many spam filters your ISP is using.
The app is not polling IMAP every five seconds, if IDLE is not supported it will poll every few minutes. But IDLE is supported by pretty much all major IMAP implementations these days. Battery usage should not be any worse than whatsapp.
(Score: 1) by Nail_Biter on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:16AM
This FTC nonsense looks like theater. The FISA Letter has likely already been received.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ObsessiveMathsFreak on Sunday April 27 2014, @01:48AM
It's not about the money; it's about the users. Facebook didn't pay that amount of money for a piece of software they probably could have rolled together in six months. They paid money for the userbase. The FCCs feeble and frankly bizarre request that this not be monetised is irrelevant. The purpose of the purchace was to shift these users under the Facebook umbrella ASAP.
P.S. .... exclamatory. A little understatement goes a long way.
I don't think Soylent summaries should be so
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27 2014, @02:18AM
Perfectly said, on both counts. How is that not modded +5 ?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Boxzy on Sunday April 27 2014, @12:16PM
The post was added completely verbatim, I have to admit I was surprised.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Sunday April 27 2014, @02:55AM
> The FCCs feeble and frankly bizarre request that this not be monetised is irrelevant.
From TFA, the FCC's actual request is: "We want to make clear that, regardless of the acquisition, WhatsApp must continue to honor these promises to consumers." Asking Facebook to keep to its public promises hardly qualifies as bizarre.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khchung on Sunday April 27 2014, @05:14AM
This is just the kind of word games that lawyers or 6 years old play. Do you think Facebook wanted the users to be friends to them? Facebook bought the user base to make more money.
FTC's request is exactly on the spot, a company (Whatsapp) made some promises (data privacy), when that company was sold, the buyer (Facebook) also bought the obligation to honor those promises, those promises didn't become automatically void because of the transaction. FTC just reminded both companies of this.
Obviously, FTC knew how Facebook makes money, and like everyone else, knew what to expect.
It boils down to how many users do Facebook think Whatsapp will lose if they actually tell the users how they are going to change the terms. FTC just reminded them they can't do it quietly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27 2014, @03:07PM
Are we still under the impression that "privacy policies" mean anything at all or have any legal standing? I thought we'd moved beyond that cute level of Internet naivete.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by broken on Sunday April 27 2014, @04:50AM
So Facebook can, and most likely will, change the privacy policy for WhatsApp. The FTC put some conditions on how they do this. Facebook will stretch the interpretation of those conditions as much as they can in order to lose as few users as possible as a result of the change.
These conditions will certainly reduce the value Facebook can extract from their purchase, but it will not (and is not intended to) prevent them from commercializing it. Since the conditions sound more or less like "Don't commit fraud", it's hard to argue that the conditions should have any effect at all on what Facebook can do with WhatsApp. The largest effect I see is the lesser possibility that Facebook could break the law and avoid any serious consequences. (I.e. another settlement where they promise not to do it again becomes less likely if they are warned ahead of time.)
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 27 2014, @05:16AM
The summary contains three rhetorical questions out of five sentences, plus sneer words (e.g., "bully", "nuts") and a dangling modifier thrown in for good measure. Though, the modifier dangles only if the FTC aren't the ones who "knows Facebook" and are an ex-Whatsapp user. Who's to tell?
I really want to like Soylent News, I do, but the signal-to-noise ratio here isn't outstanding, mostly due to sloppiness. Editors, stick to facts. Let readers arrive at their own opinions. And use good enough grammar such that readers don't need to re-parse a sentence to figure out its meaning.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday April 27 2014, @06:33AM
Just in general, I wish there were some way to reign in acquisitions. Big companies eating smaller companies, because the big companies have hit a dead end - this just isn't good for the marketplace, the consumer, or indeed anyone other than the managers of the morbid big company...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.