WhatsApp and the domestication of users

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Today we offer you a very interesting article, it is not written by us but was translated by us thanks also to the help of Mate Translate. The original article and of Rohan Kumar and we liked it so much that we wanted to propose it here on Le Alternative too.

And here we see the beauty of license in all its splendor Creative Commons. In fact, just like our blog, Seirdy's (the author's nickname) is also CC BY-SA 4.0. It means that anyone (even for commercial purposes) can reproduce, share and modify our texts. The important thing is that the authorship of the text is attributed and, above all, that it is distributed with the same license.

Other articles you can read that we have translated are: Why encryption matters: 10 myth-busting facts, What is Google FLoC? And Do I need a VPN to avoid being tracked?

The second episode of this article has been translated here: Protect open platforms.

This is where the article originally written by begins Rohan Kumar and under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 and was written on January 27, 2021.

WhatsApp and the domestication of users

I have never used WhatsApp and never will. Despite this, I feel the need to write an article on WhatsApp since it is a perfect case study to try to understand a category of business models that I call: taming of users. User domestication is, in my opinion, one of the main problems facing humanity and deserves a detailed explanation.

WhatsApp wasn't the first messaging app of its kind, and it probably won't be the last. I simply chose to focus on WhatsApp due to its recent privacy issues.

Let's start.

The rise of WhatsApp

For those unfamiliar, WhatsApp is a tool that makes Facebook's main mission convenient and easy: the optimization and auctioning of human behavior (commonly known as “targeted advertising”). WhatsApp initially persuaded people to agree to this by allowing them to send text messages to each other over the Internet, which they were already possible combining an easy-to-learn user interface and successful marketing. It then expanded to include features like free voice and video calling. Free calls have helped it grow into the go-to communication platform de facto in different parts of the world.

Having its own proprietary chat system that is incompatible with other clients has allowed WhatsApp to build a network effect: Existing users are prisoners because leaving WhatsApp means losing the ability to communicate with WhatsApp users. People who want to switch apps have to convince all their friends to switch too; this includes less tech-inclined friends (and relatives) who have already had a very difficult time learning to use WhatsApp.

In the world of WhatsApp, people who want to stay in touch must respect the following rules:

• everyone they must use only the proprietary WhatsApp client to send messages; alternative client development is not supported;

• Everyone's phone must be running a supported operating system. Since WhatsApp developers will only write a program for the most popular operating systems, the Android and iOS duopoly is strengthened;

• users are completely dependent on WhatsApp developers. If WhatsApp developers decide to include malicious features in the app, users they must accept it. They cannot switch to a different server or client without moving away from WhatsApp and therefore losing the ability to communicate with all their WhatsApp contacts.

User taming

WhatsApp has grown by trapping previously free people in its enclosure and changing their habits to create dependence on their masters. Over time, this made it difficult or impossible to return to their previous lifestyle. This process should seem familiar to you: it's eerily similar to the domestication of animals. That's why I decided to call him taming of users: eliminate the autonomy of users to trap them and put them at the service of suppliers.

I chose this metaphor because animal domestication is a gradual process that is not always voluntary and typically revolves around one group becoming dependent on another. We know for example that the domestication of dogs began with its socialization, resulting in partially artificial selection that promoted genes that led to greater friendliness and dependence on humans ¹.

Whether voluntary or not, user taming almost always follows the same three steps:

1. a high level of user dependence on a software provider;
2. inability for users to control their software, through at least one of the following methods:
   1. prevent modification of the software;
   2. prevent migration to a different platform;
3. the exploitation of users who are now prisoners who are unable to resist.

Completing the first two steps left WhatsApp users vulnerable to user taming. With investors to answer to, they had every reason to implement user-unfriendly features without consequences.

So, of course, they did.

The descent of WhatsApp

Domestication has a purpose: it allows a master species to exploit domesticated species for its own gain.

Recently, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to allow data sharing with Facebook. Users who agreed to use WhatsApp based on its previous privacy policy then had two options: accept the new policy or no longer be able to use WhatsApp. WhatsApp's privacy policy update is a classic bait: WhatsApp attracted users with a sleek interface and the impression of privacy, domesticated them to take away their autonomy to migrate and then backtracked on his previous commitment to privacy with minimal consequences. Each step of this process enabled the next step; if user domestication had not taken place, it would have been easy for most users to walk away without any problems.

Those of us who were sounding the alarm a few years ago experienced a brief moment of sadistic bliss when we went from being “annoying, paranoid conspiracy theorists” to “annoying.”

An attempt at damage control

The operation bait-and-switch (bait and switch) caused a fairly significant backlash by allowing a notable minority of users to migrate to other platforms; this number turned out to be slightly higher than WhatsApp probably expected. In response, WhatsApp delayed the change and released the following announcement:

The announcement lists various data that WhatsApp it does not collect or share. Sugar the pill of data collection by listing the data Not collected is misleading. WhatsApp does not collect hair samples or retinal scans; not collecting this information does not mean that you respect privacy because it does not change the information actually collected by WhatsApp.

In this announcement, WhatsApp denies "keeping the history of recipients of messages sent or calls made". Collecting data is not the same as “keeping history”; it is possible that the metadata is fed into an algorithm before being discarded. A model can therefore learn that two users call each other frequently without maintaining metadata logs for each call. The fact that they specifically chose to formulate this type of narrative implies that WhatsApp already collects this class of data or has deliberately left the door open to collection in the future.

Lcurrent privacy policy WhatsApp currently reveals that they collect considerable metadata used for marketing through Facebook.

Software freedom

In the face of user domestication, providing software that helps users is one way to stop their exploitation. The alternative is simple: that service to users is the real goal.

To avoid being controlled by the software, users must be in control of it. Software that allows users to have control is called free software. The word “free” in this context refers to freedom and price (note from Le Alternative: this phrase may sound strange in Italian because in English we talk about free software where free means both freedom and free). Software freedom is similar to the concept of Open source; the latter is an offshoot of the former focused on more business-friendly practical benefits rather than ethics. A less ambiguous term that neutrally refers to free software And Open source And FOSS (or also floss ²).

Others have explained i fundamental concepts at the basis of free software and the its importance better than me, so I won't go into details. These are four essential freedoms:

• the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose;
• the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs;
• the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others;
• the freedom to improve the program and distribute improvements.

Earn money with floss

The most common objection I hear is that free software makes it harder to make money.

The key to making money with FOSS is to make the software a complement of other more profitable services. These include sales support, customization, consultancy, training, Hosting managed, hardware and certifications. Many companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are a few names that come to mind.

L'Hosting managed is not a basket to keep all your eggs because giants like AWS (Amazon Web Services) can do the same at a lower price. Being a developer can give you an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; doesn't offer such an obvious advantage when it comes to Hosting.

FOSS it is not always enough

Free software is a necessary, but sometimes insufficient, requirement for building immunity to domestication. Two other conditions concern the semplicity And open platforms.

Simplicity

When software becomes too complex, it needs to be maintained by a large team. Users who disagree with a provider cannot easily execute the Fork and maintain a gigantic code base, especially if the software in question potentially contains security vulnerabilities. Vendor dependency can become quite problematic when complexity causes development costs to skyrocket; the vendor may resort to implementing user-unfriendly features to stay afloat.

Complex software that cannot be developed by a different group of people creates dependency, the first step in user domestication. This alone is enough to open the door to problematic developments.

Case study: Mozilla and the Web

Mozilla was a glimmer of hope in the God Wars Browsers, a space dominated by advertising, surveillance and vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, the development of an engine for Browsers it is a monumental task difficult enough to make even giants such as give up Opera And Microsoft who now have theirs Browsers based on Chromium. THE Browsers become much more complex than simple document readers: they have evolved into applications, with their own technologies for GPU acceleration, Bluetooth, authorizations, device enumeration, group multimedia codecs, DRM ³, extension APIs, development tools… the list goes on. It takes billions of dollars a year to respond to vulnerabilities in such a massive attack surface and keep up with a standard that is growing at such an alarming rate. Those billions have to come from somewhere.

Mozilla ended up having to make major compromises to stay afloat. He made millionaire deals with search companies that were clearly hostile to users (Google) and added ads And Bloatware as Pocket, a proprietary bookmarker partially funded by advertising. Since acquiring Pocket (to diversify its revenue sources), Mozilla has yet to maintain its own promises: while the source code of clients has been rendered Open source, the server code remains proprietary. Opening the code and rewriting portions if necessary is understandably a major task due in part to Pocket's complexity.

Important Fork as Pale Moon they are unable to keep up with the increasing complexity of modern web standards. In fact, Pale Moon has recently had to migrate his code from GitHub since GitHub started using Web Components, a feature too complex for Pale Moon to support. It is almost impossible to start a new one Browsers from scratch and reach the giants that have operated on ridiculously high annual sums for decades. Users can choose from an engine Browsers developed by Mozilla, an advertising company (Blink by Google), or a monopolistic solution provider (Apple's WebKit). WebKit doesn't look bad, but users will be helpless if Apple ever decides to back down.

To summarize: the complexity of the Web platform forced Mozilla, the only engine developer of Browsers which claims to be “designed for people, not profit”, to implement user-unfriendly features in its Browsers. The complexity of the Web has left users with limited choices between three major players with conflicts of interest whose positions become increasingly entrenched over time.

Just to know, I don't think Mozilla is a bad organization; rather, I think it's amazing that they're able to do so much without further compromise in a system that practically demands it. Their main product is still FOSS and third-party builds with very light patches remove the antifeature.

Open platforms

To prevent a network effect from developing into vendor lock-in, the software that naturally encourages a network effect it must be part of an open platform. In the case of communications/messaging software, it should be possible to create alternative clients and servers that are compatible with each other to prevent the first two steps of user domestication from being completed.

Case study: Signal

Since a certain car salesman he tweeted “Use Signal”, a large number of users have obediently changed their messaging app. At the time of writing, Signal clients and servers are FOSS and they use some of the best E2EE out there; however, I'm not a fan of it.

Although Signal clients and servers are FOSS, Signal is still a closed platform. Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike is quite critical of open, federated platforms, describing his rationale for keeping Signal a closed platform in a blog post ⁴. It means that there is no supported way to develop an alternate server supported by Signal clients or an alternate client that supports Signal servers. The first step in user taming is almost complete.

In addition to having a single client and server, there is only one Signal server provider: Signal Messenger LLC. Users' dependence on this central server provider exploded on them during Signal's recent growth which caused downtime for over a day, rendering every Signal user unable to send messages until the individual provider fixed the issue. problem.

People still try to develop alternative clients: a Fork of Signal called LibreSignal attempted to make Signal work on privacy-friendly Android builds without proprietary Google Play Services. That Fork it shut down after Moxie has clarified who disagreed with a third-party app using Signal's servers. Moxie's decision is understandable, but the situation could have been avoided if Signal didn't have to rely on a single server provider.

If Signal decides to update its apps to include a user-hostile feature, users will be just as helpless as they are now with WhatsApp. While I don't think this is likely, Signal's closed platform leaves users vulnerable to user taming.

Even though I don't particularly like Signal, I still recommended it to my non-technical friends because it was the only messenger private enough for me and simple enough for them. If he needed any special settings (creating accounts, manually adding contacts, etc.), one of my friends would have stayed with Discord or Whatsapp. I would say something cute or cheeky like “you recognized yourself huh?” if there was even the slightest chance he would get that far in reading this article!

Food for thought

The previous two case studies – Mozilla and Signal – are examples of well-intentioned organizations unintentionally making users vulnerable to domestication. The former has a lack of simplicity but embodies an open platform model. The second is a closed platform with a high degree of simplicity. Intent does not come into play when considering the three steps and countermeasures of user taming.

@paulsnar@mastodon.technology highlighted a potential conflict between simplicity and open platforms:

“I have the impression that there is a certain tension between simplicity and open platforms; for example Signal, in a certain sense it is simple precisely because it is a de facto closed platform, or at least so Moxie claimed. In turn, Matrix is superficially simple, but the protocol is actually (in my opinion) quite complex precisely because it is an open platform.”

@paulsnar@mastodon.technology

I don't have a simple answer to this dilemma. It is true that Matrix is extremely complex (compared to alternatives like IRC or even XMPP), and it is true that it is more difficult to build an open platform. That said, it is certainly possible to face and master complexity when developing an open platform: Gemini, IRC and email are a few examples. While email standards are not as simple as Gemini and IRC, they evolve slowly; this prevents implementations from having to catch up like i do Browsers Web and Matrix clients/servers.

Not all software needs to produce billions. The federation allows to services and networks like the Fediverse And XMPP to scale to a large number of users without forcing a single giant to sell their soul to pay the bill. While anti-domestication business models are less profitable, they still enable the creation of the same technologies that have been enabled by user domestication. What's missing is an advertising budget; the biggest publicity some of these projects get are long, unpaid blog posts.

Maybe we don't need to chase growth and try to "get huge." Maybe we can stop after achieving sustainability and financial security and make it possible for people to do more with less.

Endnotes

Before it turned into some kind of manifesto, this post was supposed to be an expanded version of a comment I left under a post on the Fediverse Of Binyamin Green.

I originally decided to expand it into its current form for personal reasons. Nowadays, people ask for an in-depth explanation every time I refuse to use something that everyone they use (WhatsApp, Microsoft Office, Windows, macOS, Google Docs…). They usually ignore the explanation, but expect one anyway. The next time I meet them, they will have forgotten our previous conversation and will start again with the exact same questions. Justifying all my life choices by sending logically correct statements into the void – knowing that everything I say will be ignored – is an emotionally draining process that has taken a toll on my mental health in recent years; sending my friends this article and changing the subject should save me a few gray hairs in the years to come.

This article extends the guiding philosophies of the Free Software and Copyleft movements. Thanks to Barna Zsombor for giving me good feedback on IRC.

Since 2900 words wasn't enough, I wrote a follow-up: Keep platforms open. Check it out if you found this article interesting (note of Le Alternative, we also translated this and that found here!).

1. Pierotti, R.; Fogg, B. (2017). The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. Yale University Press[↩]
2. Many within the free software movement dislike the term “Open source" for a series of reasons; others use the terms “free” and “Open source” in a way interchangeable. Finally, many vendors use the word “free” to refer to price rather than freedom, prompting some free software advocates to adopt the term “libre.” This can all be confusing, which is why I prefer acronyms like floss to describe the intersection of these terms.[↩]
3. Defective by Design[↩]
4. Moxie's blog post generated a lot of responses. Two good ones follow up I'm up Linux Weekly News and a post on the Matrix.org blog[↩]

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