I know I say this a lot but ad-supported business models are corrupting. Spam is the original sin of the open internet and the unwillingness to get to grips with this is a big part of why we can't have nice things.
On Usenet, which ran on NNTP, every user could maintain their own killfile, which would allow people to hide spam. But it wasn't easy to share killfiles, and while the more technically capable people would easily filter it out they were also blinding themselves to a problem that eventually choked the life out of the community. Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess.
The basic problem is that the costs of spamming and lying are generally a lot lower than the potential profits, so the more opent he system the more spam it tends to attract. Try looking at used car adverts on Craigslist for example, dealers in busy areas tend to run a hundred ads a day with 500 keywords. Some people flag them, of course, but most don't bother and the profit in selling a single car is worth the minor downsides.
> Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess.
I think we have two separate issues here.
One is the business model problem. Google puts ads on YouTube, then out-competes actually-free software alternatives because they have money from advertising and for-pay alternatives because they don't charge money to users. Hello surveillance capitalism.
The other is the Twitter problem. It's harder to block (only) low-quality posts than make them, therefore Twitter.
I think the first one is just a coordination problem. We need a one-time expenditure to get the likes of PeerTube to a level of usability, reliability and performance equal to YouTube, and that's it. Then you don't need YouTube anymore, or Twitter or Gmail or anything else that could be replaced in that way. It takes a one-time expenditure of resources to create the technology, so we just need a way to raise the money. Once it exists it's a lot easier to raise the smaller amount of money needed for incremental improvements. (And really it's already happening but it's taking too long to get to the mass adoption phase for lack of resources.)
The second problem is harder, but maybe some kind of proof of work system for account creation. So there is a one-time cost of some kind for account creation, negligible for an ordinary user who will use it for ten years but costly to a spammer who will have their account blocked with all its posts removed in 30 seconds.
Software is a continuing expense because software developers want to justify continuing to get paid. Tell me what I get from YouTube today, that I should care about, that I didn't get five years ago.
Qmail does late bounces for a very specific reason: since it was architected and implemented long before spam became a serious problem, Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB) implemented Qmail in a highly efficient, but inflexible way. ... Qmail is essentially dead - there is no further development on the project as a whole, users of it are stuck with an old core, and lots of ad-hoc and sometimes conflicting patches. In other words, an obsolete design, and no ongoing coordinated maintenance.
One reason I support the DOJ action against Facebook is that with the power of subpoena and compelling testimony we might finally find out all of the dirty tricks Facebook have been up to all of these years.
Bill Gates squirming during his anti-trust testimony when answering questions from David Boies was game-changing for the company and our industry
I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better
Cory Doctorow was talking about this on the most recent Exponential View podcast, a great riff on how that really helped the competitive landscape, at least for a while. Worth listening to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exponential-view-with-...
It would be weird that they'd make it display a 404 though. It's possible Signal could be returning that when they see FB perform a request to them for some reason (e.g. want to make sure no metadata leaks to FB).
Whatsapp isn't close to a monopoly in the US. Here iMessage, SMS, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger by far have greater market share. You can argue that FB Messenger should be linked to Whatsapp for the purposes of anritrust, but even then, there is very healthy competition.
Monopoly is one part of antitrust laws but you don't have to be a monopoly to be breaking antitrust laws. This is pretty clearly anti competitive. Other examples would be price fixing or bid rigging (where you purposefully underbid so your competitor can win the contract for cheaper. And then your competitor does you a favor later).
No more than a Ford dealer buying a billboard outside a Chevy dealership. It's not anti-competitive to advertise in the same place your competition advertises.
The issue with Facebook doing this is the fact that they're a huge company that is buying these ads where the smaller company cannot.
It is illegal and anticompetitive to be a huge company using enormous resources to squash competition for smaller firms. There are many ways in which this is done. Not all of them are illegal, depending on how you look at it.
My opinion: Buying marketshare is usually bad for the user.
At the very least, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise for the words "Local Craft Soda (tm)" -- especially if competitor's name is what they are buying.
I can also say by having lived there that it is the same for Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. There will always be an exception to the norm, but it is clear that Whatsapp is the number one tool for instant messaging/calling.
Facebook and Whatsapp are effectively the same entity, as the recent requirement of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook shows. It's basically Microsoft with Windows and IE using special hidden dlls to execute faster than Netscape and that was of course a landmark and exemplary example of anti-trust abuse by a non-monopoly in either OS or browsers. Facebook needs to be broken up and the special ownership rules privileging Mark Zuckerberg need to be removed.
Assuming you are referring to the current wave of private censorship in the wake of the storming of the US capitol, I think it’s a false equivalence.
Here people are arguing this looks like monopolistic behavior (that the law attempts to make illegal); and there people were arguing for allowing de-platforming (that the law could be read as encouraging to limit the liability of the platform). This analogy erases the nuance that might make one desirable to society and the other undesirable.
>This analogy erases the nuance that might make one desirable to society and the other undesirable.
Could you explain the nuance then? In recent days I've found this explanation often used and generally in ways that I am not convinced of. In many cases, the arguments being presented are done so without any concern for nuance, so I find it hard to expect someone to understand nuance that wasn't originally included in the argument. I get this is largely a result of people only presenting a summary of their argument (as I find any writing to be a summary as words convey less than thoughts contain).
Especially since we are not talking about legal action the government is taking to ban something dangerous enough to society to be illegal, but a private business choosing to ban something because they choose to do so.
It’s possible the other people were implicitly saying private companies should be free [to not publish someone’s speech]; I can’t argue on behalf of all the other people you have talked to.
But I can say that to me these are just different situations. It’s not contradictory to think that companies should be free to not associate with individuals for their brand, but should not be free to buy ads impersonating a competitor, or blocking links to a competitors products. The phrasing of companies should be free to do X doesn’t carry over to a different issue.
I'm getting slightly fatigued with this point of view ("X is a private company and can do what it wants").
If a company reaches a certain size and has a quasi-monopolistic position so that other people or companies depend on it, it starts to have some degree of responsibility towards society that's beyond value maximization for shareholders.
As an idealists who repeats the "private companies can do what they want" perspective, I agree fully. But this is the legal situation, and asking companies to take any kind of moral stance is going to be an uphill battle.
Whatever future we want, we are going to have to push for it legally. Because right now management can be replaced if shareholders don't like what they're doing, given that shareholders are their only legal obligation here.
Well played. It is their platform, I don't see a problem in what they are doing. If someone doesn't like it, then use a different one.. (that is the narrative, right?)
I think this is the point. Going after, not the people actually making a call to violence, but some service three degrees upstream from them -- along with all of its other legitimate users -- is madness.
Yes, but a private company does not have to be consistent in how it applies it standard. One could even argue the standard is consistent but more complex, something of a difference between 'ban app that allows bad things' and 'ban app that allows bad things which we don't own', though this gets into the nature of what is consistency, arbitrariness, and hypocriticalness.
It's muddled by the fact that the largest tech companies have been known to enter into secret (sometimes anti-trust violating) agreements. For all we know the other companies have an agreement to deplatform apps like Parler in the name of "free speech" but just to make sure that one of the big tech companies is dominant in a given space.
I'm not saying I think such an agreement exists in this latest spat of deplatforming. I am suggesting that that's the kind of conspiracy theories such capricious & unprincipled stances take (& yes - they are unprincipled given how much it depends on which political party is dominant when they go to do something).
A more benign framing of the conspiracy is that the tech companies desperately want to avoid any trust-busting activities by Congress so when the right is in power they don't do anything about right-wing extremism letting it grow & conveniently when the left is in power they deplatform right wing extremism that has grown, making legislators more anxious to enact any kind of regulation (just like the BS that MPAA played with ratings to avoid getting regulating).
>A more benign framing of the conspiracy is that the tech companies desperately want to avoid any trust-busting activities by Congress so when the right is in power they don't do anything about right-wing extremism letting it grow & conveniently when the left is in power they deplatform right wing extremism that has grown, making legislators more anxious to enact any kind of regulation (just like the BS that MPAA played with ratings to avoid getting regulating).
If we accept the 'private company' argument as it has been recently presented, then even this falls under it as an acceptable outcome. I am not making an argument saying we should either reject or accept it was presented, only that if we were to accept it, this is a conclusion of the argument.
It looks like the link is fine when clicked by the recipient, but the preview comes up as 404.
Either fb/wa is doing something odd in the request when generating the preview, or the other end is responding badly to something unusual-but-correct that there's are doing. Perhaps due to the initial request's accept headers a redirect is being sent instead of the usual content, and requesting that results in a 404.
Could be malicious as many are suggesting, I certainly wouldn't put it past them, but I suspect cockup is a more likely explanation.
No, I mean I can't reproduce the preview. I think you experienced a fluke. If it was anything else wouldn't that mean that WA wasn't in fact e2ee? Or at least link previews (I know Signal does this client side, I don't know about WA)
App linking (URLs that open apps) doesn't work in Messenger. You have to press-and-hold the link, tap "Open in Safari", and then safari will redirect to the app. Terrible UX.
The link preview is generated locally, but Whatsapp blacklists domains it doesn't want previews to be generated for by marking them as 'bad domains' in the app. It did this for telegram a few years ago, and an analysis of the android app's source code proved it was intentional.
This practice is called "Brand bidding" and is actually extremely common among competitors. Occasionally companies will mutually agree to not participate.
It's actually surprising why it's not perceived to be more hostile.
I don't know if this is still the case, but for a while the easiest way to get the best deal from Dominoes was to search Google for Pizza Hut with your adblocker turned off.
Ya this is kind of a non-story. They were probably bidding on 'Signal' prior to this current set of events anyways. And since Signal doesn't appear to be bidding on it's own name, Facebook is probably paying very little for that top spot.
Bidding on your name might be an even bigger waste of money than bidding on a competitor's name, especially for established brands. eBay's experience with this came up on a recent episode of Freakonomics - https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
Whenever I search for a brand by name and an ad for them pops up (in the rare case that I’m browsing without an ad blocker), I try to click on the non ad version right below it just to save them a bit of money.
"Ah, yes. I'm looking for a peer-to-peer, secure messaging system. What's this, Facebook Messenger? Maybe I'll try that instead."
In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.
When I’m annoyed with an ad, I love clicking on it, especially since a click can cost from $.5 to $12. Also, upon clicking, they build a profile of me based on products I don’t like, so all the better.
Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).
It's usually detected by anti-click-fraud stuff (since it's the same UA, cookies, and IP that's mass whacking ads, it's the easy case). However, the users of the tool occasionally intend to punish the publishers (people who put these ads on their sites) which does happen for some low volume publishers - like your buddy's blog with AdSense and stuff.
I usually block all known trackers and advertisers, so even if they could track me (which is less likely to happen) they don't get any benefit from that.
This sounds like cutting off the nose to spite the face. Sure, you may be harming the advertisers, but you are directly reinforcing the ecosystem that creates those annoying ads in the first place by telling them you like those ads.
I hate ads too, but let's not pretend like this childish rebellion is actually self-serving. It's like me saying I'm upset with politics so I'll show the world by not voting.
Given the current mass (for some values of "mass") migration, there will be some people who have very low tech knowledge but read enough about migrating to signal and WhatsApp being bad, that they'll search for "Signal" and will try the first communicator that comes up. Not sure if they will be fooled for long, but still... People are fooled by basic spam and they will be fooled by this.
Probably because their Chinese overlords told them to. Memes and conspiracies aside I do think it’s a little suspicious that Zuck asked Xi to name his friggin first born child. And the amount of information including beliefs and location that this guy has on our families is mildly terrifying.
Seems like a waste of effort by both Facebook and Signal advocates when the Dems will just lobby to have big-tech ban anything that can be used by the far right to communicate.
I find this to be a bit strange from a marketing perspective and the cost to run this campaign has to be non-trivial. If someone searches for Signal, what is the likelihood they don't already know what Facebook Messenger is? What is this ad supposed to convince someone of? Like you see the ad after searching for Signal and go "oh I have Facebook Messenger"?
I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook.
I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.
Cynically I'm guessing it's for potential new users who have heard of Signal vaguely and inducing brand confusion. "Oh, Signal is part of Facebook Messenger, cool, already have that."
I was curious about this from a trademark angle (it seems against the spirit of the law if not the letter) and apparently it's generally permitted to show ads based on a brand keyword as long as the ad itself does not contain any trademarked terms or images. I don't personally agree with that but it supposedly been tested in a few courts.
I miss the old Google layout where it was crystal clear what is an ad. Nowadays, you can't even blame normal people that they don't notice the tiny "Ad"
Do Signal buy ads against their own name in the App Store though? Despite adding Google-like search ads, Apple haven’t broken search and they’re always the first organic result for their name, so I don’t see why they would want to.
What’s really annoying is searching for an app and it shows up in the search suggestions but doesn’t exist. For example, search “Red Robin” in the App Store and there’s a suggestion for it. But what shows up... Robinhood (with a DoorDash ad above it). Turns out Red Robin doesn’t have an app. But then why is it a search suggestion?
I wonder if there's automated ad purchasing going on here, bidding against the keywords of the top app names in relevant categories?
It seems that Facebook bidding on Signal keywords is unlikely to gain them much, as those searching for signal right now are very likely going there expressly to escape from Facebook, and are searching for a specific brand name already.
Facebook has the cash to burn, even if it's a less-than-stellar marketing decision. My guess is this is a short-lived advertising campaign to protect the moat during this heated moment.
Deep down, I hope this has nothing to do with a "marketing decision", and is just a hail-mark "Fuck, look at all the people fleeing WhatsApp since we announced the privacy changes? We have to do _something!_ What're we gonna tell Zuck?".
(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)
Judging from what I'm seeing personally, it would be hard to explain the sudden increase in the number of my contacts that installed Signal as regular churn. Though I acknowledge that the choice of my contacts is probably not representative of the whole population.
I would assume they’ve been doing this for a long time. Lots of companies do stuff like this. If you’re against this then you have to be against basically all search ads. You can go search for Venmo or Cash App now and you’ll see ads for some other banking products.
Yeah everybody here is up in arms because it's FB/Signal but this is as old as the hills. Search for any major product and most of the ads will be their competitors.
Not sure why this is a big deal. Is it good? No. Is it new? Not particularly.
It definitely seems like a policy that should be reexamined. If you're a newcomer to a market and a big entrenched player buys up all of the search ads with your product's name, how can you hope to be discovered via SEO?
Ads are pretty clearly highlighted as such at the top. If your SEO is good then you will still be at the top, just below the ads.
I do agree that a lot of these companies do have the ability to use advertising to crush their competition, but I’m not sure what the solution is to that.
App Store Ads are genuinely awful. I have yet to find any that have been anything but spam apps or companies buying their competitor's keywords. They quite definitely make the App Store worse.
I'm guessing that for the app store team everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center. The company makes money from it but it's not tied back to the app store team or not tied back directly enough. Ad revenue however is tied back directly. So they optimize the KPI they are measured on.
> everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center
Really?
Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales...
My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)
I said app store team not Apple overall. To Apple its revenue, to the team running the store app its a cost center. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the gains from improving user experience do not trickle down to them enough. After all, many many teams will claim credit and take a slice of that pie. However, only a few teams can claim credit for ad revenue. Within a large company the goals of the company and the goals of individual teams are rarely fully aligned.
This is kind of embarassing. Do you guys think that the people at Facebook who make these decisions realise how pathetic it looks from the outside? Or are they somehow justifying it in their own heads?
They don’t “realize it’s pathetic” because it’s SOP for companies buying ads to bid on their competitor’s name. You can argue that that is pathetic, but this one instance isn’t special.
I click on the ads of products I dislike so that the company gets charged for the ad. If you wanted to inflict the maximum damage, then click on the ad and install the app. Uninstall it later. I think the ad gets charged more as a "conversion".
If it's a company as big as Facebook, I think those charges are drops in the ocean of their entire revenue, so you waste more of your time and nerves on doing that than the money they lose.
While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.
I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...
> While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.
But you're always going to see an ad regardless, right? If that's the case I don't see any advantage in making yourself more expensive.
Sadly with Facebook,you can't be sure they won't install a backdoor application that will reinstall it after you uninstall it. That may just be some phones with Facebook and Messenger preloaded though.
It would have to be something preloaded, and with unusual privileges. Otherwise, it isn't installing anything silently on Android. I don't think this would happen at all on iOS.
Our great-grandchildren are going to look back on history and struggle to understand why we used a search engines that intentionally accept bribes to poison their SERPs.
I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).
They wont struggle, they will easily understand the phenomena and even group it under the same umbrella of the rubber barons,Spanish conquistadors and the opium merchants . A group of thugs exploiting a market by mercilessly taking advantage of undefined, inadequate and slow regulation on which it is basically a new situation, all this helped by buying the politicians.
As a relatively small business with no clout we've had to deal with fly-by-night operations violating our trademark with Google ads (basically randoms running ads that look like they are from US when people search our web domain) and Google not doing anything because we didn't register the trademark. Of course Google won't do anything—it'd hurt their bottom line!
As I understand it, if you didn't register the trademark then it's not your trademark legally except as a defense against lawsuits. So Google seems to have followed the law. Better than them becoming some sort of extra-legal arbitrator of quasi-trademarks.
This is exactly the mentality I was talking about in my first comment.
You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising.
Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.
"Under U.S. law, use of a competitor's trademark in accurate and non-deceptive comparative advertising is legal and does not constitute trademark infringement" [1]
Which shows that it is a fairly grey area. "Fair use" doctrines apply to trademark infringement and using your competitor's name in this way has in the past been allowed.
Signal is a registered Trademark. They are buying ads for the word Signal. How is that not Trademark squatting?
> Facebook is not bribing anyone.
I think OPs point is that it should be considered bribery to pay Google to show up at the top of the search results. I think they chose their words very intentionally.
I read it in the context of "some day". They may be expressing optimism that the legal definitions could be corrected to match what they (and I) consider to be the commonly used meanings of these words.
> Trademark squatting is when one party intentionally files a trademark application for a second party's registered trademark in a country where the second party does not currently hold a trademark registration.
It seems difficult to do this in general when so many search terms can have multiple meanings. Are you suggesting there should be human review for every ad? (Which is not saying it's necessarily a bad idea; just trying to understand how you imagine it'd work.)
Yahoo Search used to have a list of brand keywords that advertising was restricted on. Not perfect but covers the vast majority of cases especially if you allow additions over time. Apparently since then the courts have ruled that it's not a legal issue so it's not done anymore.
That seems reasonable, though likely less effective for some countries. It seems like an interesting regulatory idea though - maybe some regulator should maintain a list of trademarks whose advertising should be restricted? Not sure if that might end up becoming gameable.
I think a lot of people here will say that there should be a decentralized "global" index that any search provider frontend can source their results from. I'm not sure exactly how that would work. But the goal is to separate advertising from the search index itself.
I'm confused, what is the relevance of that to this problem? Wherever the results are coming from, ads will have to appear before them pretty much by definition, right?
If the owner of the search index is also the advertising broker then you end up in situations like this. If the search results themselves are effectively commoditized, then the advertising layer becomes less of an issue.
You may be assuming too much of our great-grandchildren. Based on what we can see of mobile phones today, they will be having their attention spans minutely controlled at all times, and may not be thinking anything.
Many non-technical or older people can't easily tell the difference. I've seen it in action with colleagues and relatives (smart well-educated experts in their fields).
Because long term thinking and good relationships with users is worth more than whatever small % of revenue Apple gets from letting these shitty search ads scam old people and less technical users.
You should not be able to buy ads on a company name that isn’t yours.
I suspect people higher up at Apple that see this would agree and change policy if they thought about it.
If someone is searching for Signal, what makes them see Messenger and decide to click that instead? I don't understand how this isn't throwing money into a fire.
Most people outside the tech bubble can't tell an ad from a search result.
They don't use ad blockers either, that's why banners saying "DOWNLOAD NOW" in flashing red letters work so well, leading them to download something completely different from that antivirus or PDF reader software they originally searched for.
Their target audience are the elderly and those who are illiterate in technology in general. I have personally seen people around me click the first result that shows up without even stopping to read what is written on it. They just assume that "I asked for Signal and it is Signal". That is the amount of trust they have. It is only when they get fooled do they go through multiple stages of confusion before they finally realize what is up: Hey why do I have this app? -> I never downloaded it -> Is this a virus? -> Have I been hacked? -> Let me ask my relative/friend who is a computer geek -> Oh it is something I download myself? -> Oh this isn't Signal? -> Oh okay I get it now -> Shall I uninstall it? -> Okay I'll uninstall.
There are some who skip this and just assume that the app they downloaded is Signal even if the app clearly says Facebook Messenger.
^ This is how scamsters take advantage of the elderly and those who do not have basic tech know-how. You'll be surprised to know that there are millions like that.
The entire idea of ads in the App Store is slimy. Half the reason I buy Apple stuff is because the transaction model is simple - I give Apple money and they give me stuff.
This is one of the major reasons that I don't believe search ads are worth anything for any but the largest of players. There will always be someone with a larger check book, especially if you are just starting and bootstrapping your thing. The playing field is always tilted in the direction of the larger player
If it is fair for Apple to sell ads inside App Store’s search feature, it is perfectly fair for someone to buy a competitors keywords. This is also done all the time. I find the App Store to be the one to fault by making the ad look the same as a search result
Would it be permissible to place a giant billboard on the sidewalk right in front of your competitor's store?
It's unethical and anti-competitive to try to drown out your competition because you have enough money to be able to do it.
IMO both Google and Facebook should be punished for allowing it and doing it respectively. It shouldn't be possible to bid for your competitors' names.
This is a really agressive move from facebook. Now when people switch from whatsapp to signal, some will assume messanger is better and not notice the tiny ad badge.
Has anyone recently tried searching for ‘Signal’ to check this? I don’t see any Facebook Messenger ads personally. Think this is a bit of marketing from Signal.
It's possible that Facebook isn't intentionally targeting Signal.
When buying App Store ads, the default is to use a "broad match" for the keywords you enter -- i.e. Apple automatically decides what keywords are similar to the keywords you selected and runs your ads against those as well.
It's pretty annoying because there's no way to switch the default -- you have to remember to put your keywords in brackets to disable it -- but probably great for Apple's revenue.
That’s what I don’t understand. Everyone I know has migrated away from facebook a long time ago. And a few years ago I heard stories suggesting this was a broad movement. People organising their birthday on facebook and no one showing up, etc. Kids today aren’t using facebook either. But facebook’s results suggest they are growing their active user base. So if those numbers are real, their user base must shift. At least away from european+educated users.
But then I read stuff about Oculus and how hard it is to create new accounts. If that is true the user base growing would be strange... Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...
>P.S. There will never be ads in Signal, because your data belongs in your hands not ours.
I don't believe my data belongs in my hands when I use Signal, because they own the servers and the only one who takes design decisions for backend side are they.
The comment was edited after I replied to it—in fact it was basically rewritten. If it had been written that way in the first place, of course I wouldn't have replied.
To be more clear. I removed one sentence. That was:
> WhatsApp doesn’t sell ads too.
And there was this question.
> If my data belongs in my hands, why they own the servers and the only one who takes design decisions for backend side are they?
Please be specific and remove ambiguity when you moderate, otherwise your point seems subjective and is misleading.
Plus I believe everyone in this site can freely express their thoughts without attacking anyone. With that in mind I don’t see any wrongdoing with previous version of parent comment, I just edited my comment to be specific.
When I replied to you above, your comment began with "That's ridiculous", which is just the sort of thing that we ask people not to do in comments here. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That's mainly what I was responding to, though there were some smaller things that you also edited. However, what matters most is that the form you edited it into is really good, and if you comment in that way going forward, everything will be better.
> When I replied to you above, your comment began with "That's ridiculous", which is just the sort of thing that we ask people not to do in comments here.
Lol, yes I recalled from my memory, that I forgot as well as slight edits, sorry.
I agree and admit that it is not polite.
You edited your GP comment after I replied to it, to remove the place where you had broken the site guidelines. Sometimes people do that to make the mods look bad, but I'm going to assume you didn't do it for that reason. Please don't do it again, or at least not without explaining to the reader that you did. That holds whether the other commenter is a mod or not. It's just good manners.
Also, please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25696652). We're trying for something different on this site, especially now.
When Signal says your data belongs in your hands, they are referencing the end to end encryption in the app, which means that any of your data that goes through their servers is encrypted and can't be read by them. This can be verified by people partaking in a Signal message through the use of their safety numbers and through building the app from their published source that you can verify only ever sends your encrypted data to Signal servers. It's true that we can never be sure what's in Signal's backend but we can also prove that anything we send to their backend can't be read by them regardless of its design.
Your data is not limited to your messages. Who do you talk to, how many times, when, where, your social graph, when you go online, how frequently you are online, what avatar you have etc. etc.
And remember you are authorizing yourself with your number, which is for most people is valid identifying point, and can be used to trace back to individuals.
While Signal claims phone numbers are hashed and never used for any real identification purposes and whatsoever, I think this is still very questionable. They could easily design the system to allow one to authorize with username from the beginning.
I don't wanna go into much details, but I personally will never take anything Signal tells for granted for two main reasons, first it's centralized (it's doesn't matter if it's owned by non-profit organization), second it's operated in the USA, meaning they are bound to cooperate with intelligence agencies when they have to.
I know I say this a lot but ad-supported business models are corrupting. Spam is the original sin of the open internet and the unwillingness to get to grips with this is a big part of why we can't have nice things.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
On Usenet, which ran on NNTP, every user could maintain their own killfile, which would allow people to hide spam. But it wasn't easy to share killfiles, and while the more technically capable people would easily filter it out they were also blinding themselves to a problem that eventually choked the life out of the community. Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess.
The basic problem is that the costs of spamming and lying are generally a lot lower than the potential profits, so the more opent he system the more spam it tends to attract. Try looking at used car adverts on Craigslist for example, dealers in busy areas tend to run a hundred ads a day with 500 keywords. Some people flag them, of course, but most don't bother and the profit in selling a single car is worth the minor downsides.