3w ago

WhatsApp is launching third-party chat support across EU Countries, which means you can now ditch WhatsApp for an EU alternative: BirdyChat from Latvia.

forums.macrumors.com

WhatsApp Launching Third-Party Chat Support Across EU Countries

WhatsApp is close to rolling out third-party chat support across the European Union, as part its compliance with the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA)...

Technology @piefed.social

Ek-Hou-Van-Braai @piefed.social

3w ago

WhatsApp is launching third-party chat support across EU Countries, which means you can now ditch WhatsApp for an EU alternative: BirdyChat from Latvia.

forums.macrumors.com /threads/whatsapp-launching-third-party-chat-support-across-eu-countries.2471149/

21 comments

Anything Meta touches should be considered suspicious. Especially when it comes to privacy.
- They let OpenWhisper do the underlying protocol, so it's solid. Beats the shit out of a plain text message anyway, and people IRL might actually have it.
I wonder how they've choose these platforms. Haiket.com doesn't even come out by lookin it up on duckduckgo.
BirdyChat is under limited access. Must wait in waitlist or have an invite from someone already in. Plus they say on their site its "access is limited to professionals".
Also, obviously, none of these are foss.
- Then seems like they may have chosen these platforms because they're not accessible and thus not threatening, in a malicious compliance way
  Although, giving them the benefit of doubt, perhaps they wanted a low blast radius for their first integration rollout, which is considered good engineering practice.
- And birdychat is professional only.
  
  Professional what? I'm very professional at being professional.
- The Haiket website doesn't seem to disclose anything about the people, company, org, or group behind it.
  The privacy policy does not disclose them as processors by name either.
  The privacy policy GDPR section does not talk about shared information, presumably because they don't because they can't without consent, but the California section says:
  Please see the "Do Not Sell My Personal Information" section and "Limit the Use or Disclosure of My Sensitive Personal Information" section for more information on how to opt out and limit the use of sensitive information collected.
  Implying a default no-explicit-consent selling of personal and sensitive personal information outside of the GDPR regions.
- They don't choose the platform, the platforms choose them. Under EU regulation WhatsApp as a "gatekeeper" has to give access to any other platform operating in the EU if they request it. Threema, Signal and co simply aren't interested.
  
  So anyone from Europe can ask it? And only these two showed up?
Wake us up when there's an open source client.
Wasn't Element going to integrate into it as well?
- Element uses the Matrix open standard which supports bridges. I don't know if the WhatsApp bridge uses the web interface or API for the PC desktop app, but that one is working for quite some time already.
  For people not wanting to configure it all from scratch there are already pre-build complete packages bundling up all your usual messengers in one location/app like Beeper.
  
  Yeah, but they were talking about building out WhatsApp third party compatibility on top of it.
  There already was Element One, which bridged to a bunch of things for a small subscription fee, although it had to break E2EE to do so. I'm just finding a lot of broken links now, though.
- Element says lots of things.
  
  Oh? What else have they said? I didn't know there was a reputation for fibbing.
Still a US-Company. Needs to give EU-data if US secret service says so.
fucking finally!
Still same to me.
can i take advantage of it outside europe?
- no you cannot take advantage of Europe outside of Europe.

21 comments