It still requires a phone number to sign up, but you don’t need to share it to chat with someone

Aren’t these pretty standard features for any modern music player? I’ve been using PA for years and it’s definitely on another league, but I have explored many alternatives in the past and all of them had good queuing support

if you need a consent-or-pay example, just open La Repubblica’s homepage. You will be prompted with the “accept all cookies or pay” prompt as soon as you open the site. Pretty standard practice for most Italian online newspapers, sadly

I’m still trying to figure it out, but I guess not. The only thing I’m sure about is that you will know whether the OTP code has been sent by Telegram or a P2PL relay

You can decide to send sms codes only within your country. You decide whether the tradeoff between costs, privacy and features is worth it. Sending 150 sms a month (or a magnitude more) would cost me 0 €. I find some of the premium features worth paying for. But I would never relay OTP codes for telegram

Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram

It’s mainly to offload the cost of sending verification codes via sms to users, which is one of the costs that Telegram wants to cut. As far as I remember, it amounts to, like, 7% of all their annual expenses (I will source this later). A couple of years ago they decided not to send sms verification codes when you sign in from a third-party app, and just send the code to active session. This sounds like recipe for moderation headaches and privacy disasters, but also good way to boost their premium metrics :)

It’s opt-in, of course

I’ve just tried to sign up from Firefox 122 and it worked. No captcha or other kinds of anti-bot puzzle to solve

Tried to open that webpage but godaddy asks me if I want to buy the domain. Typo?

From the article:

$100,000 per day for a country with ~5.4 million people is a lot. If even 20 percent used Facebook regularly, then that would still be 10 cents per user per day. It’s unlikely that Meta is generating so much profit per user - every day.

This is a reasonable observation and I wonder what Meta would do once one of their services becomes unprofitable in a specific country. Anyway if you add Instagram and WhatsApp to the math, maybe they would still generate profits from the Norwegian userbase

Metadata is not a concern with family and close friends, which is what one should be using it with onl

Unfortunately this is the real world and whatsapp is used by two billion people for all kind of stuff: work chats, meme chats, business-to-client chats, local chats, news chats, even public chats which invite links are posted on Instagram pages and Facebook groups. Of course the app being very popular and, in some countries, almost impossible to leave behind (“how could I ever stop to use whatsapp? I have all my contacts and chats there!”) makes a very fertile environment for spammers, scammers, stalkers, and all this kind of people whatsapp doesn’t want on its platform. Cause they are annoying and dangerous for tech-illiterate people and boomers. So yeah at the end of the day, in a platform that is already compromised at its roots, moderation have a reason to exist even if the chat app is encrypted because it helps to flag actually annoying or dangerous accounts, and of course it helps big corps to keep their image clean - they don’t want to be associated with spam or other shady stuff.

Also: assuming even the dumbest of the users would come to the conclusion that if you use a red button labeled “report”, the message is going to be examined by some platform moderator to judge whether it is legitimate or not, why would you be so scared of a scenario where your chat partners have the ability to willingly send your plain text messages to WhatsApp/Facebook? If this is a possibility, isn’t your chat with this person compromised already in first place? As they can willingly do whatever they want with the unencrypted content they receive anyway

Hmm, honestly, I don’t understand what’s weird about it. Of course if you report a message, it will be sent in plaintext to some moderator which then will have to evaluate the report. How would reports work otherwise? Among all the things that make whatsapp a compromised platform (obfuscated closed source code, constant push to enable google/apple cloud backups, recurring vulnerabilities being discovered every other month, being owned by literally Facebook, metadata being collected and kept at the disposal of Facebook), this seems the least relevant to me. I mean, I didn’t expect their report system to work any differently. I definitely back your suggestion to move to Signal or some other alternative of course!