Comment by kwar13 a day ago
It is really important to not build your national infrastructure around closed-source proprietary software that other nations control.
I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp.
Huge national security in my view.
I'm a capitalist but yes when national security is in play "free market" in my book doesn't apply. You can't have health appointments, airline tickets, government services by default on WhatsApp. Most don't even bother with email and just default to WhatsApp.
It was kind of the same but not as pervasive with Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.
None of those are national security issues though, they’re QoL issues. The problem isn’t WhatsApp owning the market, it’s governments making the choice to only make their services available through WhatsApp and providing no alternative of their own to receive services. Every single “WhatsApp is too dominant” story I’ve seen usually boils down to governments acting as enablers for the supposed issue themselves.
You don't think WhatsApp for some reason stopping to work and airlines losing their default way to issue tickets is a national security issue? How about health care appointments with national ID and address on them being sent as PDFs and stored on Meta's servers? All of those are massive national security issues for me. It can grind the country to a halt for days on end.
There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
Of course they are. It’s basically foreign soft power infiltration, invasion, control, and conquest. WhatsApp is Meta, Meta is deeply associated with not only the US government and its agencies, but the various entities of state control in the subordinate countries that believe they are being provided a means of controlling their countries, but do not realize or are deliberately subordinating themselves to the empire that is called America.
The pernicious thing that neutralizes many people like yourself, is that you cannot understand that meta/Facebook/WhatsApp is not just innocuous private business somehow magically different than the government in which at least you have a theoretical level of control over in a democracy.
Every place that an “American” company controls aspects of a technology inside a society is effectively to that degree conquered by the “USA”. One’s own country simply does not exist anymore to the same qualitative degree that it is controlled by foreign technologies/companies. That is also the revealing argument the system made when it threw its fit about the Chinese control of TikTok! So at least the “American” system believes it… “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
> The pernicious thing that neutralizes many people like yourself
I get exactly how people view private American companies abroad and that’s irrelevant to what I actually said.
Why are governments running all their communications and services through a private American app? Even in America, we’re not doing that, and there is always a fallback in some form of the telephone system, email, the postal service, the web or just showing up in person for anything that is absolutely essential. If I’m doing anything through a 3rd party app like WhatsApp instead, it’s either not that essential, or I’m doing it as a convenience but the fallbacks are always there.
So when people are talking about utterly essential services being run through WhatsApp and only WhatsApp, that seems like the obvious problem, because if that’s true, that’s also very stupid, and also a very stupid choice. Facebook profits from the situation, you could even say America profits from the situation, but you can’t say it isn’t without mutual engagement and compliance on the part of the supposedly aggrieved parties here.
Yes. Absolutf*kingeverything is whatsup. That was annoying at the beginning.
But: people there are practical and flexible. It would take days to a month to migrate, what is impossible in first world, just take Germany as an example.
Also whatsapp is e2e encrypted, so not so bad. In Germany many things go over FAX or mail, totally unencrypted…
Yeah it is annoying on principle having everything on WP but it's not the worst piece of software (yet). I think I would rather have it than the American system and their blue bubbles vs green bubbles or fragmentation between multiple incompatible and shitty proprietary messaging systems.
It used to piss me off now I despise it.
Another massive problem is if Meta has a fit with your organization, they can ban you from using WhatsApp for Business. All these Latam countries should and must pass regulations to avoid this kind of behavior. Free market all you want but if you captured market, it’s the nation’s responsibility to ensure their people can get the best service even if these companies are hating each other.