komeijist
No, it's a false binary choice presented by you in which the only outcomes are "dealing with it" (severe overreach) or the destruction of the country.
You don't fail to see how it would keep researchers busy for years, but why would only researchers be interested?
Collective benefit over individual rights is not a novel discussion. I see people trying to make a case for individual rights be construed as anti-collective benefit. These people however are also just people, trying to speak for what they think is right, but often times get criticized for it. A lot of times people consider starkly different cost-balance calculations and arrive at different conclusions but this is rarely made explicit. What if you set the time scale a little differently? Corona might be ravaging the world today, but how about in 50 years? 15? Laws to combat terrorism passed during times of crisis that were supposed to be temporary are still here (not a US resident, I might be misinformed, but I hope my point is evident).
there is also the fact that I cannot take the code and compile it myself, proprietary solutions like the nvidia linux driver for example have given me headaches so many times, it would be nice if there was some form of entry to the code to at least get a vague idea of what the code is supposed to be doing. I basically have to pray for software to do what I want, when it doesn't the whole solution due to it's closedness/unadaptivity becomes useless to me.
Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. EMF2012 (by Thomas Figg)
to the uninitiated, I recommend also taking a look at http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
As the author states, there are no real alternatives. In theory, WhatsApp can be replaced by lots of other applications. I settled for Wire, as I would choose an application that makes use of the Signal protocol while also having an open source client + server over WhatsApp any time of the day. In practice, few want to even consider using something that is not WhatsApp. I managed to convince some close friends to install Wire alongside WhatsApp (can't have unencrypted SMS as my only communications channel), but it took some convincing and privacy aware ethics rambling (if that makes sense) to achieve that. I can't imagine any somewhat sane person wanting to bother with so much trouble when branching out to alternative solutions. This particular sentiment from the article especially couldn't ring any more true:
"At the beginning, I often felt isolated and as if I had abandoned friends. Some contacts ebbed away, while I had to withstand the odd awkward look of disbelief and discontent from others when I explained that I did not use WhatsApp."
I can understand the convenience gain by using WhatsApp over regular SMS. That convenience is hardly unparalled nowadays though, the one thing that keeps people chained to WhatsApp is it's ubiquity, in the sense that every person you meet will quite likely have WhatsApp installed (do note that I'm saying this as part of a somewhat younger demographic).
I find this quite sad. My motivation for switching was simple, I didn't want to take part in any business Facebook sticks their fingers in. Whether Facebook uses all the metadata they get through WhatsApp, and for which (possibly nefarious) purposes is irrelevant, they've been shown to make unscrupulous use of data that should be private in order to conduct social experiments and whatnot a long time ago [1]. Am I in the wrong for trying to be mindful about the usage of my, very personal, data? I really hope I am not.
First time poster here, sorry if this sort of anecdotal evidence doesn't fit the type of content that is usually posted on here.
Also, what a funny way to send an article off.
[1] http://veekaybee.github.io/2017/02/01/facebook-is-collecting...