Category: Chat

Whatsapp sharing your phone number with facebook? Privacy??

2016-08-26 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

Whatsapp had added a new entry on the company blog saying that it changed the privacy agreement to allow sharing your phone number with Facebook the parent company, does this sound like a surprise to you?

Whatsapp changing the game

Since 2014 Whatsapp said it will test with features to ensure that it stays free after it canceled the 1$ per year fee, but until yesterday no one knew what the plans were.
Whatsapp will share your number with Facebook for advertising purposes, to help
deliver better service and connect you to companies and service providers based on your friends and interests, while promising not to share your number with anyone and emphasizing the fact they added end to end encryption.

Isn’t this spamming?

Whatsapp thinks that it’s OK to send messages like these, you are already receiving messages on your mobile and receive phone calls, why not Whtasapp messages with content like this?

There is a way out of this tho, even partly.

How to keep your number from being shared?

Future versions of Whatsapp will have an option which you can enable or disable to op out of the phone number sharing, but the rest of the newly updated privacy policy will apply to you as soon as you open Whatsapp!

So this is the price of being free?

I think I like the old 1$ per year policy, it’s not so bad once you think of the huge privacy violations Facebook and now Whatsapp are committing towards it’s users!
Nothing is for free, everything has a price and if you aren’t paying for it, then you are probably paying a different kind of price, you are being the merchandise!
It’s a pretty sweet deal I must admit, free calls and unlimited free text messages, but if your privacy matters to you, the calling price would be too high.

Any alternatives?

Lets go back to February of 2014 when Facebook announced its monstrous acquisition of Whatsapp in a record breaking 12 billion dollar sale, people starting migrating to Telegram like crazy, they knew the age of private free communication was over!

I’ve blogged about comparing Whatsapp to Telegram some time back, right now Telegram is the sure fire way for a secure chatting experience, as for Whatsapp, I’ve uninstalled it already!

How do you feel about this sudden change? Do you still trust Whatsapp and Facebook with your privacy? I’ve blogged about leaving Facebook and still in favor of unplugging from it.

Life after leaving “the book”

2015-10-20 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

It’s been a few months since I deleted my Facebook account once and fo rall. I felt that Facebook took away my friends and a big part of my life and productivity, but my friends and acquaintances felt differently..

Many of them felt that I didn’t want them in my life, or thought I was being a jerk for unfriending them (take this seriously! People were killed for unfriending some people!) and the general attitude was very unfriendly.

In short, I had no social life (ironic isn’t it?)

I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that some people who have my number, email, know where I live still want to have me on Facebook when they could just call me and get this over with!

Social stigma

I’ve been called a nerd for not having a Facebook account (kind of weird isn’t it) and many people are staying away because I don’t have an account on the site, while there are many social options to choose from. One statement in particular I found really alarming as one of my friends said after I deleted my Facebook I went “off the grid”, so Facebook is the grid now? This friend has my number and knows my website, how can I be off the grid if my blog is active?
I prefer to have real friends, like the ones you had before signing up to Facebook, people to meet and talk to, not some avatar and a couple of likes!

Chat Apps

I agree that chat apps help communicate people in an effective cost efficient type of way, I don’t believe that the cost should be one’s life!
I missed out on many announcements and events, because it’s so much easier to create a page than to have a proper website. Where I live many companies and government offices use Facebook to communicate with customers, and to be able to know what’s going on you need to have an account, and from what I saw, people don’t have Facebook accounts, Facebook has people!
It owns them and I simply refuse to be treated that way!
And just for the record, Facebook owns Instagram and Whatsapp.
I say what’s next!!

Final words

While my friends and acquaintances continue to live the way Mark wants them to live, succumbing every last bit of detail voluntarily to the site, I remain to be the holdout, while Facebook continues to expand eating away all competition, I’ll be watching it, living it, and not posting about it..
There are tons of chat apps out there where you can chat without being owned.

**An update: Facebook went out for 21 minutes on September the 25th, so many people were lost and confused!

Telegram instant messaging application review, channel update

2015-09-23 / Muaad Elsharif / 0 Comments

We have looked into several chat apps in this blog such as Whatsapp and Viber. Telegram focuses more on privacy and security more than these apps.

Telegram’s popularity exploded when Facebook announced it’s acquisition of Whatsapp in early 2014 raising security concerns among users, peaking 50 million downloads that day alone. Telegram is free and open source and has no advertisement what so ever!

Let’s take a look at the reasons to abandon whatever you become addicted to and switch to Telegram.

Who can you chat with in Telegram?

Much like Whatsapp and Viber, your contacts are your phone book contacts, and you can look users by user name as well.

You can talk to a single person or be a part of a group, and you can chat people using the secret chat feature.

Telegram features

Free and open source

When Whatsapp has been recently changed to become free, Telegram is free for life and has no ads what so ever (almost too good to be true!), while Viber has the sticker market which always wants you to buy the stickers.

Private

Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct, which is great for privacy (unless you are the parent of a teenager!) the most secure form of chatting you can have is provided by Telegram.

If the other person tries to take a screenshot of the secret chat, you will be notified! That’s amazing 🙂

Fast

Telegram delivers messages faster than any other application ( I still need to put this feature to the test), it tends to delay on SIM data but in general it’s fast!

Secure

Telegram keeps your messages safe from hacker attacks.

Powerful

Telegram has no limits on the size of your media and chats, while Viber and Whatsapp limit you to media files, you can send anything with Telegram! (Zip .MP3 .Doc) as big as you like!!

Cross platform / Cloud based

All of the popular platforms are supported, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and in case that wasn’t enough, there is a web version. And you can access your chats from an unlimited number of devices you have, and the web version is independent, you don’t have to prove to be online to chat on your PC!

Download

Click on the platform you have and it will take you to the official app in the store (you don’t want to download an unofficial app).

Download for Android

Download for iOS

Download for Windows Phone

After we looked at the awesome features, lets take a look at some things Telegram has:

As of August 2014 Telegram delivers 10 BILLION telegrams each day!

You can create a bot to do whatever you want (if you have the skills to do so) and this bot will fetch your email, check the weather or even play chess! Read more about it here.
You can enjoy strong and private chats with your friends and co-workers, create groups to chat more efficiently or even subscribe to channels.

Channels

This is the latest features added on September the 22th 2015

Channels are the latest way to deliver messages to an unlimited number of subscribers, where they can catch up to the latest messages and read all the message history, each channel has a view count and a members count. and for a better understanding of it subscribe to Telegram’s channel, and you can create your own channels right away as the new Android / iOS version will have this feature with the latest update, others are coming soon.
And before you ask, no it doesn’t support voice/video calls!

It’s not a VOIP application, it’s not a video chat application. It’s a chat application that does! They might add the VOIP option later, I don’t think it’s going to be free. So enjoy the incredible feature set.

Conclusion

I am happy to find a chat app that Facebook hasn’t got it’s claws on yet! Those guys are all over the place! Telegram is safe, secure. Totally free and completely awesome!

The possibilities are endless, and the development is ongoing!

Do you use Telegram to chat with friends and family? Please tell me your experience with it in the comments section below.