Contemporaneous to this was the rewrite of the privacy policy to allow sharing of metadata between FB and WhatsApp user accounts, which was a bit of a sell out.
WhatsApp end-to-end encryption didn't actually begin until after the acquisition to Facebook had already gone through[0].
I am certain that, as of 2012-2013, WhatsApp wasn't even consistently using TLS to encrypt traffic. That's what made it so shocking when they suddenly leapt from some of the worst security practices of all messaging apps on the market to the best[1]. They built a massive userbase long before any efforts were made towards privacy and encryption.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472340,00.asp
[1] Signal didn't exist at the time, and yes, TextSecure existed, but almost nobody was using it compared to WhatsApp or any other chat app on the market today.
I believe most users simply use it because it is the most used messaging app in their country
It's difficult to understand for the average person just how much Facebook knows about you and what it can do with that information that isn't in your direct interest. At best they think it's weird how long-lost acquaintances show up as suggested connections, at worst they only notice when Facebook does something directly useful to them.
Sure, you can blame the users, but that's kind of unfair if you consider what kinds of markets WhatsApp already dominated before the acquisition.
Why does every thread on Hacker News have to ask this freaking question? It’s obvious that the general public is computer illiterate, Sherlock, just like it is obvious everybody knows someone “good with computers” that can tell them what to use and having lived the sunset if Yahoo Messenger in my country, Facebook should be scared as it happened practically overnight.
Edit: Note: WhatsApp publicly claimed that a billion users paying $1 each is enough for them. Also remember, a lot of the technical complexity, infrastructure requirement and data storage requirements went away in their model of being just a conduit. They had no interest in reading, parsing, mining, storing or monetizing the messages. This let them run it with a lean crew.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-on-ios-now-free
We're entering a world of a widening disparity between rich and poor. A billion dollars puts you, your children, and their children in the very wealthy side of that line for their entire lives. That's hard to say no to.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Goalkeepers?WT.mc_id=...
Obviously a very ironic source but the others were more political.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
If anyone is looking for data-driven cases on the scale and negative consequences of the increasing divide between rich and poor, I've found some good resources in Robert McChesney's The Digital Disconnect, Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality, and probably most famously Thomas Piketty's 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First century which Gates himself even recommended, ironically enough. All these books come under criticism for supposed ideological undertones, but even skeptics generally respect the underlying economic data.
I don’t know if inequality can be reduced on a macro level, but I would not bet on it.
Some things can be changed and some can’t. Your example of maternal health is great—we should be focused more on those types of biological things we can change, imo. Who cares if someone is richer than you if you are healthy and happy?
But inequality seems to be something nature loves. The sun gets 99% of the matter in the solar system, for example. Humans decimated all other large predators—examples abound.
Concentrated freedom and decision making power (for which money is just a proxy), might be a necessary evil. I think barring a drastic black swan paradigm shift (world government, computer overlords, or maybe some undiscovered push to an equilibrium driven by globalization...), there’s not much that might change that.
But you must recognize that human society is simply the summation of many individual choices, and there is a big difference between saying something is unlikely to happen, and something cannot happen. Pragmatism and cowardly cynicism are two different positions with dramatically different possible outcomes. Instead of accepting Keynes over Polanyi as a foregone conclusion, try looking at the individual choices that were made to get us to this position. Repealing Glass-Steagall in the '90s was a choice. Deregulation in the '80s was a choice. 100 million Americans eligible to register choosing not to vote out politicians who make these decisions are 100 million choices. There may be systemic reasons for why those choices were made, but I am simply right now trying to get you to see that these outcomes are not foregone conclusions.
Your justifying logic for holding your beliefs is certainly not rigorous -- you can just as easily find examples of nature favoring equilibrium and balance in every conceivable force diagram or cell membrane as you can of the existence of inequality. If you are looking for a nature metaphor, why not try a chemical reaction? In an inert environment, oxygen molecules will not spontaneously transform into carbon dioxide, even though carbon dioxide is a more stable chemical state. But once the necessary conditions exist -- the presence of sufficient carbon and enough available activation energy to perform the reaction -- a single spark can cause a chain reaction to convert every single oxygen molecule present into carbon dioxide molecule. No matter if previously, every oxygen molecule was insisting, "But this is the way things have always been for us! Some things can be changed, and some things can't."
We have not yet reached the necessary conditions for our society to reach a more stable state, so you are not wrong in saying that it seems unlikely that the reduction in inequality can occur without certain tipping points being reached. But it is folly to conclude "...there's not much that might change that" without educating yourself on the missing conditions and realizing that it is possible to slowly work towards achieving those conditions or empower others who are taking steps to achieve those conditions. Conditions like political will, corporate regulations and safeguards against regulatory capture, fighting disinformation campaigns, and educating people on the harms of inequality, done very well by thinkers like Stiglitz, Varoufakis, McChesney, Chibber, Polanyi, Bernie Sanders, John Kay, Tim Wu, and many others who have considered the effects and are working on solutions. So that when that single spark comes along -- a great leader who can move the masses to rally behind a vision of a better world -- hopefully we will have done enough to move in the correct direction. We are closer than we think probably, if you look at how close the elections of Gore and Sanders were, for example.
But, I should say in the end I am encouraged by anyone who is willing to read and educate themselves on the matter and engage with differing viewpoints. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am optimistic for the future, but I will do whatever is in my power to create a fighting chance for those who have not yet given up in the face of difficult odds.
But overall, the gains of technology are being concentrated in a few hands.
The economists say that wealth is primarily created by tech change, everything else is just a functioning economy working as it would.
It seems that the low base effect makes every thing better off if you were terribly off. But if you were middle income you are worse off.