It is not considered a good alternative as a messaging app for privacy folks and because the source code is not open, it is not E2E encrypted by default (you need to start a secret chat or something to make your conversation encrypted) if I remember correctly.
I am using a deGoogled phone and also doing browser separation, I only use google in chromium, never for searching stuff. I was talking about getting an electric toothbrush and my wife googled a big brand to check the price (she does not care about privacy). About 10 minutes later ad blocking was not working for some reason and I starter getting toothbrush ads. I would say it knew somehow that we were in the same household and targeted us both.
Fully agree. I once wanted to try it. I took a look at the documentation for partitioning and realized that I needed 2 full days for a working installation and constant access to another PC to be able to read the documentation… No thanks, I don’t care about the hate, Debian/Ubuntu is up and running in 30 mins and gets out of the way…
I have a European perspective and here you need to pay per text message. Receiving is free, but the bank is charged and they put their charge on me, so they bill me for the messages, unfortunately. In the US SMS is free in most plans as I know.
I always ask if they have a curtain. Why have one, when you have nothing to hide? It blocks the view, sunlight…
Sms is not as secure as a 2FA app or the bank’s own app. SMS verfification also costs money, so it will raise your monthly fees quite much if you wish to receive a text on every transaction.
I tell everyone that messenger is not installed on my phone and I check messages once a week. So if they contact me there, expect a one week response time. (Or more.)
Viber is really very annoying, constantly nagging me about their “newest stickers” and other crap. When I open it, it’s like times square on my phone with all the garbage ads…
I looked into this a year ago and most sites did not offer to register a second key, so if you lose your key, you can kiss many of your accesses goodbye. I would never have the key to my digital life on a keychain… The idea is good, but it will cause huge damage if you lose your HW key. On the other hand, if you are cautious and use different PWs and a password manager with 2FA, you are quite safe.
And there’s when you spend 20 minutes composing your argument, then you decide to delete it, because “It’s not worth it.”
There’s the info you are willingly sharing through the app, no permission for that. There are really a few apps that require no permissions, usually they always need access to something. E.g. the LG app for washing machines that will only run if you register and account AND give permission to make phone calls, when you only want to download washing programs…
Most of us would probably just be fine with PWAs, but the marketing branch says no… They need everything possible about you, need the app to run at startup and send you notifications at least every 4 hours…
And it will not get upgraded to 20.04, it will stay on 16.04. My biggest issue was that I could not do much with it. It was only a bit better than a dumbphone. Without apps, every mobile OS dies and back in the day I could not even get Signal working. It was a pain to set up webdav for contacts sync and when I gave up and wanted to use my own nextcloud, it refused to work because of my https cert…