Tom Rundle

Qanon Supporters be like: Bottom Text

drawinG Credit: holly turner

Drawing Credit: Holly Turner CaPtion Credit: tom rundleCaption Credit: Tom Rundle

art by Gal kraJnC

words by JaCob Cerin

This Refresh Mint will pump you up to leave behind all the toxicity. Freshen up your day. Go to Italy. This mint will kick you into being a hard worker, but stay humble, punk. Be the best version of yourself and beat your competition to a pulp. But at the same time, this mint will help you and it’s not about the race, man. The raspberry flavour is about peace, and just vibes. You don’t need to succeed or anything, just have vibes. But hustle that dough, punk. Let your victories scream out online. But stay humble, and it’s not about the prize. Live, laugh, love xx. Grind-time prime-time. Get that dough but spread love and don’t worry about money or stuff. Taste this mint ASAP. Be a role model to your peers and don’t stop until you know you are.

But, like, don’t worry about what other people think.

Whatsapp’s Signal:

A Fresh Frontier in the Privacy Wars

ahmed suliman

art by Pauline wonG

It is safe to say that the start of 2021 has not been a pleasant one for Silicon Valley’s social media giants. The fallout of the US election put them (Facebook and Twitter in particular) on the centre stage of global public debate once more. Decisions around everything from election ad policies to banning the (now former) US President inflamed already deep divisions around who can and should have access to a platform on these private yet seemingly omnipresent forums. From a policy perspective, the EU has set its sights on, more broadly, examining the power of these companies to make such pivotal decisions in the first place, and is considering various measures to limit their influence.

You would think that this would be enough trouble for a lifetime, but in early January Facebook decided to throw fuel on the flames of yet another highly contentious issue: privacy. The company announced that from February 8th, the userbase of its subsidiary Whatsapp would no longer be able to opt out of having their data collected and sent to the parent business. This elicited outrage from many quarters, and was widely seen to be a betrayal of the more than two billion Whatsapp users worldwide.

To understand this reaction, some context is needed. Whatsapp’s early days as a small independent company centred around developing a robust messaging tool that provided private and encrypted communication over the web to anyone with a mobile number. This vision was incredibly successful in acquiring users since the app’s launch in 2009. It attracted tens of millions of new downloads every month, which were supported by fewer than 60 staff. However, it soon became clear that there was a key issue: there was no obvious way to make money. Personalised advertising, the ever-favoured business model of most online platforms, would require a degree of data collection that would have undermined faith in the company’s curated public image. Attempts to charge users nominal fees either as a one-off or on a subscription basis proved unpopular, and were eventually dumped entirely. In the end, Whatsapp decided to kick the revenue can down the road, and relied on venture capital dollars to pay costs and maintain growth. This continued until Mark Zuckerberg, of Caesar haircut and The Social Network fame, acquired the messaging startup for a whopping US$19 billion in 2014. Zuckerberg’s juggernaut, unlike Whatsapp, had no qualms about making advertising the centrepiece of its business. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to decipher why Facebook would pay an equivalent of the GDP of Bosnia and Herzegovina to acquire a company that made no money. Data is the name of the game, and Whatsapp has plenty of it.

Facebook strenuously denied having any plans to integrate Whatsapp with its core business at the time. This all changed with a Whatsapp announcement in 2016 introducing new data-sharing arrangements, which tried to soften the blow by allowing users to opt out. This last saving grace was formally removed from the privacy policy in the latest January announcement. Facebook has nonetheless worked hard to downplay the changes. If you are one of those odd souls who follow Facebook PR executives on Twitter, you might have come across strong assertions that “the policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way”.

Suggesting that Facebook is not snooping on your messages is little relief. The policy allows for the collection of metadata including phone numbers and usage details, which can be personally identifiable. Given that Whatsapp is often used by dissidents in authoritarian countries, and by many journalists to communicate with their sources across the globe, the company’s deteriorating regard for privacy has the potential to create devastating real-world impacts. That is not to say, of course, that privacy is only the domain of people with things to hide. The push for privacy online has been a longrunning counterculture to the ubiquity of both governments and businesses collecting vast amounts of data on ordinary people — permission optional.

So what’s the alternative? In the weeks following the Whatsapp announcement, tens of millions began downloading rival messaging apps Signal and Telegram. Telegram’s founder — rather boastfully — called it “the greatest digital migration in history”. A friend of mine, long disillusioned with Facebook’s empire, has been vigorously promoting the gospel of Signal recently. Signal is open source (i.e., its code is freely available for examination and improvement), run by a non-profit foundation, and is resolutely committed to privacy and an adfree experience. What’s not to love? Within a few days he convinced a few of our friends to move our group chat to the platform. Sadly, It quickly became apparent that Signal lacked many of the features of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, and it took some time getting used to. Worse still, it soon crashed under heavy demand, forcing us to temporarily migrate back to Messenger for the day.

This is not a critique of Signal, but it’s an indication of the difference in scale. While Facebook generated over US$70 billion of revenue in 2019, Signal relies on donations and its last available figures show that it brought in a mere US$609,365 annually. Signal does have support from Whatsapp cofounder Brian Acton in the form of a US$50 million loan, but it is nowhere near enough to effectively manage the growth that Signal has achieved so far, and will likely continue to have over the coming years.

It is clear that the only way privacy-first apps can succeed is if the public supports them, not only in terms of sustained use, but also financially. If Whatsapp’s experiments with charging a small fee per download or annually had succeeded, the sequence of events leading up to its latest policy changes would likely have never occurred. To this end, I have chosen to make a small donation to the Signal Foundation, and I encourage you to support privacy-centric technology in whichever ways you are able.