Signal, an encrypted messaging app that competes with other services including Facebook’s WhatsApp, said Thursday that verification codes used to create new accounts were delayed because of a flood of new users. In other words, they are suffering growing pains.
“We are working with carriers to resolve this as quickly as possible,” the non-profit foundation said in a tweet. “Hang in there.” The surge came just hours after Elon Musk endorsed the service and amid reported changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service.
The changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service are that Facebook will get to see a lot of info that it never got to see before in an attempt to monetize WhatsApp. That of course has spooked WhatsApp users as it should given that Facebook isn’t exactly known for being the best when it comes to how it uses the data that it has on you. Or put another way, nobody trusts Facebook. In an ideal world, this would get Facebook’s attention and they would address their data usage issues. But I don’t expect that to happen. Thus Facebook deserves to have its user base massively drop.
Instagram Deletes Signal Ads Because Facebook Doesn’t Want Signal To Show You How Invasive Facebook Ads Truly Are…. So You Should Really #DeleteFacebook
Posted in Commentary with tags Facebook, Signal on May 5, 2021 by itnerdSignal has had a series of Instagram ads blocked from Instagram after it attempted to show users how much data the Facebook owned company collects about them and how it’s used to push targeted ads. The ads used Signal branding and featured the user’s professional role, education, interests, hobbies, location, and relationship status, among other personal data points pruned from their interaction with the platform to. Unsurprisingly the ads never made it to Instagram users’ feeds and Signal’s ad account for the platform was quickly disabled by Instagram.
In a blog post Signal described how it generated the ads to show users why they were seeing them:
We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea.
Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.
Any business that has to actively hide what it does in order to conduct business is a business that is to borrow a phrase that the young people say is “sketchy A.F.” If you don’t know what that means, ask a millennial. I did. That means that Facebook is “sketchy A.F.” Not that you or I are surprised by that because this is Facebook we are talking about.
In any case, this is another example as to why you should delete all things Facebook.
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