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Apple Suggest They Will Withdraw iMessage and FaceTime In UK If Law Changes Go Ahead
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
275 points (96.9% liked)
Privacy
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Everyone commeting here saying “good, we will switch to X” is absolutely stupid. This law means no iMessage, no Signal, no WhatsApp, no Telegram, no secure encrypted messaging for anyone.
People completely missing the point for an opportunity to shit on Apple is on brand though. Lol.
Oh I think there is hundreds reasons to shit on Apple, but this ain’t one of them.
P2P! Direct to PC encryption!
https://briarproject.org/
https://tox.chat/
Great! If you’re technical and not have iOS. That’s already 50% of British market not using it.
Besides, it won’t help you if that’s a government mandate, and Google will be forced to take it down for the UK market from the store. Not a lot of people are installing apps from outside the Play Store.
Too bad if people arent willing to adapt. I guess you'll just have to use paper notes and face to face contact, or whatever app your government makes. /S
I don't believe Tox has had a security audit so be careful using it
Good luck enforcing that.
Anyway the criminals are just going to switch to something else so this law is useless
Bullshit. Open source distributed messaging clients will always exist. The key is to federate and host in other countries.
Okay, try explaining it to my 51 years old father. Or someone who really isn’t into tech in general.
Federated stuff will work for you and I - technically knowledgeable people. But we are a tiny fraction of population. The success of WhatsApp lays in its super simplicity.
Click this link, type email and password. Federated services are just as easy from UX side. The complexity is the backend.
It seems easy, but the moment you ask the user to “choose their instance” - you already push away a lot of untechnical people. What is an instance? How do I know which one is good? Will I be able to talk to people on other instances (look at Lemmy, some instances are blocked by other instances)? Why do I even have to choose an instance?
From an UX standpoint, that’s a disaster. Stuff like Lemmy or Mastodon will remain forever a niche, because of that.
EDIT: Typo
Yeah, don't tell your grandpa to pick an instance. Just link him straight to the registration page. Solved.
Lemmy is the same. Facebook is the same. You don't need to tell a user that their Facebook account is going to be shared by their geography. That doesn't matter.
Just link then to the registration page for the instance that you use. Easy.