yyznomad

I saw this too... "millions upon millions of new users"!

Dieuwer

Purged WhatsApp from my phone. Friends switched mostly to Signal and Telegram.

TBD

I don't understand why they're doing that publicly. Do they really think that people will side with Facebook over Apple when it comes to privacy disclosures?

jsnydcsa

That's an interesting (hence the "Like") perspective on it and what Signal is doing (or not doing) with my contacts. Might (emphasis on Might) give me some more comfort with Signal's contact access.

EDIT TO ADD - BOY of BOY, that's a LOT of heavy reading. Kinda wish is just said in plain language - "We pull every mobile phone number from your contacts - and only mobile phone number - punt it to our system, see who's on the system, return you a list of who in your contacts is on the system, and "delete" what was punted up to us in the process. Then you know and you're "done"

And, the less metadata, the better....
END EDIT


By allowing me to manually enter their phone number into the app's "address" line in the app. On any phone (mobile or even a landline), you don't HAVE to have the contact's info in the phone to dial a call. You just enter the number and attempt to connect. Why should WhatsApp or Signal or any other app need the contacts name, physical addresses, DOB, email, fax number, etc. etc. etc. (which is all in a particular "Contact Card") when all the app needs is the phone number of the recipient?

Well. Actually, other than the phone's camera taking the picture and saving it to my phone's camera roll, I don't let other apps access my photos. I don't backup my camera roll to the cloud (whether e.g. it's iCloud or a photo web site's storage). I use a wired connection between my phone and computer to pull photos off the phone, save them on my computer (and backup on a separate device) and, on an as needed basis (e.g. making a greeting card) upload certain specific photos to a photo/printer's web site for the purpose of the task.

But, to me, the question is bit of a false equivalence. Even if I DID allow a photo app (say ... Snapfish or some other such site) to access my camera, the photo app isn't taking ALL my photos from my camera roll and uploading them to some server as a prerequisite condition of using the app. With WhatsApp and Signal (though my mind may be changed about the latter, see above), I have no choice to use give up ALL my contacts to use the app. (And, yes, I know, when you're not paying for the product, you're the product...)

exp

They don't directly say they're against more privacy protections.

They say that Apple policies will hurt small businesses on FB.

Because they can't mine data and use targeted ads?

TGarza

Google is just as opposed to the Apple privacy disclosure as Facebook but has sidestepped the disclosure by not updating iOS apps. Eventually Google will have to update the apps.