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So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I'm going to guess it's the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I'm wrong and it's a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.
The chat space is problematic.
This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have
Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors
Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it's so prevalent elsewhere.
IIRC it's because US cell carriers don't charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
It is elsewhere now it's just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It's wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you'll "be at the train station in 15 minutes" that's quite a lot of characters, so that became "@ stn n 15" which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company's realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp. Then Apple came along with iMessage and no one could see the point because it only worked on iPhones whereas WhatsApp work for everyone.
That is if you stay within one country. I still get some insane charges if I text someone 60 kilometers away because it's international.
That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.
Next up:
It just about always comes down to user error. The White House trusting Signal is very indicative of the effectiveness of the app's underlying protocols and the organization's commitment to privacy. This is definitely huge publicity and I hope Signal endures the limelight.
The white house trusting signal is nice, but using it to circumvent official communication tools which document messages for the archives is not the way it should be used - they used the "disappearing messages"-feature as well. This usage is more in line with criminal organizations like the mafia or yakuza.
I believe some people have been ordered to archive the chat so that it can be presented to Congress in the future. Trouble is, looking at the screenshots it's already gone as they had the message lifetime set to a week.
I wonder if this will be seen as destroying evidence .
i'm pretty sure that there are laws regarding required archival, but laws seem optional for this administration.
There very much are law requiring archival, but now it's been ordered in the hearings as well. This makes it much more obvious that it's a problem.
