Oh no, the users will have to go into their settings and toggle it to “on”.
Oh, the humanity!
Comment on WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps
Mechanize@feddit.it 9 months ago
“One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”
Let me translate this for you: “We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.
And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!”
Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.
“We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.
Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.
I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.
Jackthelad@lemmy.world 9 months ago
LaggyKar@programming.dev 9 months ago
No, they have to convince everyone they talk to to enable the setting to be able to use this
SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Yeah lol. And it’s not as if boomers don’t get scammed enough already.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
All that then they’ll shut it down in 6 months because they’re not getting the intelligence they need
MudMan@kbin.social 9 months ago
Yeah, but you do realize all that you're describing is still more open than "this is a closed app that interops with nobody and also is permanently tied to your phone number", right?
I mean, I don't like the guys and I avoid their services whenever possible, but... man, as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward. I literally surfaced the idea of migrating to the WhatsApp group I thought would be most willing today and got nothing but crickets.
Mechanize@feddit.it 9 months ago
That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.
Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.
So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.
Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.
Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.
MudMan@kbin.social 9 months ago
But what would be the point?
I swear, people have all these weird conspiracy theories around supposed "EEE" tactics, but Whatsapp already dominates the instant messaging space. It's pretty much a monopoly. The simplest solution to continue to dominate basically the entire landscape is do nothing.
Somebody explain to me how literally having the entire market to themselves in exclusive is somehow worse than any interoperability at all. You can't tank the use rate lower than zero.
Mechanize@feddit.it 9 months ago
I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.
Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.
Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.