I wonder how many privacy policy changes Google got away with by discretely sending emails over the years and/or showing popups with overwhelming text that no one would bother reading and click <i>Agree</i> because they simply wanted to get something else done immediately (like read emails or use navigation).<p>In a way, the current hysteria is a lesson in the power of <i>defaults</i> [0]. If the default for an app/service was <i>private and secure</i> and later you make the "mistake" of <i>clearly articulating</i> that you're going to be less private... it is going to end up a PR disaster. But... if you confuse masses along the way with large privacy policies (or other such dark patterns), you may get away with it as has happened many times in the past (Windows 10 being a recent example).<p>That's the reason Facebook and others are opposed to Apple because Apple's stance on being <i>private by default</i> will hurt them: Any data hungry app / service is going to have a hard time if it needs to show notices in plain language asking permissions to harness PII [1].<p>In a nutshell, what we are seeing with WhatsApp is may be why Google will never <i>default to private</i> with Android. Whilst Google may throw the technological kitchen sink at the privacy problem; at its core, it remains a design problem: How much do you respect your user's Right to Privacy by choosing the right defaults from the get-go, how simple do you design your UX around it?<p>Despite Apple's own privacy issues, you can't fault them for seeing a pretty good first solution to all of this: A 3-line popup.<p>[0] <a href="https://stratechery.com/2021/new-defaults/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/2021/new-defaults/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654504</a>
Whatsapp ran full front page ads on major newspapers in India today. Damage control.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ndtvfeed/status/1349231715085127682/" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ndtvfeed/status/1349231715085127682/</a>
> does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way<p>Excuse me if I intentionally misunderstand this, but legal uses every trick in the playbook to get what they want. So, above says that the new policy will not affect how friends and family can't read my messages to other recepients but Facebook might?
I've started the push to get my core friends group off WhatsApp. It has been our primary means of communication for years, so it will be sad to lose our historic data such as chat threads, groups, and images.<p>Does anyone have any suggestions or tips on how to migrate data across to another platform? I'm sure most will not be possible, but I would like to at least migrate our images, ideally not manually.