this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
661 points (98.4% liked)
Privacy
32120 readers
473 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Pretty much the entire world, except the US and Canada, is WhatsApp based. Every job chat, every message you send, it's all WhatsApp. Heck to pay for parking or to get immigration visa services from the government, it's mostly WhatsApp. And yes you can send stickers.
Sometimes Lemmy loses perspective that the way 300ish million people do something is not that relevant to the other 7500 million.
Popularity has little to do with quality. And that applies to iMessage as much as WhatsApp, Facebook, or any of the other communication channels that dominate due to network effects and switching costs.
I don't disagree but don't let perfection get in the way of good enough. SMS and standard email etc are all unencrypted. WhatsApp is encrypted end to end. You may not trust meta, or like them. But that's millions time better than SMS or email.
Getting your parents on WhatsApp is a huge awesome step. Getting them to telegram or Signal or whatever else is a minor step comparatively.
The former Soviet Union, China, Korea and Japan are big exceptions to this though
I'm currently in a former USSR country on holiday and everything is WhatsApp and Telegram. Delivery drivers to government services.
Japan is still on floppy disks attached to carrier pigeons.
China is WhatsApp for every non Chinese even with the ban. Wechat for everything else but you need a Chinese mobile.
Korea surprisingly is using WhatsApp more than even prepandemic. Almost all my Korean friends are now WhatsApp versus like 1 just 5 years ago. Telegram is also popping up there.
But point taken. A few bubbles of differences but WhatsApp really does rule supreme.
Most of southeastern Europe uses Viber as the "default messaging app", so it does vary by region.
I don’t know what pretty much „the entire world” you’re talking about but Im pretty sure whatsapp has no official uses in this little known continent called Europe.
bruh what? Italy a lot of towns have a telegram and a whatsapp channel. Everyone uses whatsapp here and it's similar in Ukraine, Ireland, and several other places.
But for official „visa” and similar uses?
not for Visas but we do use it for several public uses.