Comment on WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps

• Mechanize@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

  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.

  source

  • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

    source

    • Mechanize@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨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”.

      source

      • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It's not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

        Again, the status quo is you can't do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

        I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it's live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don't, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.

        source