Indian Students Score a Partial Win in Facebook Privacy Dispute (bloomberg.com) 47
WhatsApp announced last month that it would stop begin sharing some of users' information -- phone number, contact information of people in your address book etc -- with Facebook. Two Indian students last month expressed their concern over this, adding that WhatsApp was "severely" compromising their privacy and those of other billion plus users, and that it was reneging from its original promise. They approached Delhi High Court, and after hearing from everyone, the bench of chief justice told WhatsApp that it must delete data of users who are opt out of privacy policy changes before September 25. Bloomberg adds: The Delhi High Court on Friday ruled that WhatsApp has to delete all data on users who choose to stop using the service before Sept. 25, when the new policy takes effect. Also, it can only share data collected after that date. However, going forward, WhatsApp is free to share information on users who haven't opted out. The court also asked India's government to consider if it was feasible to craft regulations to oversee WhatsApp and other messaging apps, though it didn't specify what form they could take.
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Many, if not most, users of WhatsApp in India use it as a cheap way to communicate with relatives in other countries, since telecoms charge per text even in-country. Even at $0.01 per text, with the average teenager sending over 100 texts a day, that adds up if you have a bunch of kids on a family plan. With the average income being ~$120 a month, that's going to be significant.
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It'd be better if they (and anyone else interested in privacy while texting) switched to Trillian. It's free, open-source, and not tied to some giant corporation that makes money by advertising and data collection.
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but then whom do you sue?
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Not b'cos it's cheap, but b'cos it can do 2 things
1. Send photos and videos in messages to people regardless of which phone they have - Androids, iPhones or Lumias
2. In some cases, use it to make VOIP calls or even leave voice messages
Otherwise, the only way to send multimedia is MMS, which has quite a surly reputation in India - being synonymous w/ porn. iPhones are not very popular, except w/ the millionaires there, and so people can't freely use iMessage.
India's smartphone landscape (Score:2)
Uh, Samsung Galaxies are very popular, and pretty much own the market. While Microsoft's Lumia, which is an asterisk in the US, is at par w/ iPhones there.
Reason for this is that for an Indian to get many of the apps and games from the Apple store, they have to have an US account, otherwise, the selection is very mediocre. That's different for Play Store or Windows Store, that have no such restrictions. So while it's true that there are Android phones ranging from a number of price points - from Rs 2k t
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That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
P.S. is "with" really that hard to type?
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Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
WhatsApp announced last month that it would stop begin sharing some of users' information
Well which one is it? It's like I don't do understand it!
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You really think there are editors?
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well which one is it? It's like I don't do understand it!
Well, I'll be the first to risk Flamebait mods by saying it: this summary reads as though it was written by someone whose first language was Hindi or something similar. If you read the following sections aloud in the common stereotype of an Indian accent you'll immediately know what I mean:
"their privacy and those of other billion plus users"
"reneging from its original promise"
"approached Delhi High Court"
"the bench of chief justice"
"must delete data of users"
"who are opt out of privacy policy changes"
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you mean "maneshs" just might be a native Hindi speaker? the hell you say. ;-)
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Native speakers of English, perhaps?
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Nah..Slashdot just finally outsourced their editors...or maybe just imported H-1B workers to do the work.
Seems about the same quality I've seen from most of those type of workers so far in real life.....
hap guru's is URGENT (Score:1)
# service sharing stop
# service needful do
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Stop begin (Score:2)
War is piece, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, stop is begin.
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War is piece
The whut??
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War is piece
The whut??
*click-click* Does the gun I'm pointing make it make sense now? ;)
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The Internet, by itself, is not detrimental to privacy, it's everyone trusting these giant for-profit corporations like Microsoft and Facebook and Google. If we all used phones and PCs running various Linux flavors or similar, and didn't use anything from Microsoft or Facebook at all, we wouldn't have so many problems like this.
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Oh come on. We've had a strong open-source movement now for 20 years or so (it really seemed to get in high gear in the late 90s, along with the rise of the internet), and has it really gone very far? Sure, most people have a Linux kernel running on their smartphone, which they have no clue about, but for anything consumer-facing, it's all proprietary and it's gotten worse, thanks to walled garden "app stores" and the rise of Apple. I just don't see any evidence that consumers care about FOSS or are movi
What the ?????? (Score:1, Flamebait)
"WhatsApp announced last month that it would stop begin sharing some of users' information"
English, motherfucker, DO YOU SPEAK IT?!?!
Look, I know manishs had a severe brain injury and can only edit submissions in Morse code by tapping his catheter against the toilet, but FFS is there NO ONE ELSE on staff who proofreads any of this stuff?
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