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1. Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 09-Apr-2017 12:17:01 UTC Bob Mottram
   When I was living in Manchester last year and at a few meetups asking if anyone uses XMPP the cool kids would look at me as if I was using some kind of stone age technology. I tried explaining the security model but I don't think that went down too well.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 09-Apr-2017 12:36:58 UTC Bob Mottram

     • :verified: Jeff Allen
     @profoundlynerdy I think it was the usual tale of "not invented here", plus I think they had increasing calls for them to support TLS and other security features, which being Google they obviously didn't want because their business model depends on reading all the plaintext.
     
     I don't really keep up with the Googloids but I think they have their own proprietary chat app now, probably with phoney backdoored security. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo
   • :verified: Jeff Allen (profoundlynerdy@mastodon.technology)'s status on Sunday, 09-Apr-2017 12:44:01 UTC :verified: Jeff Allen

     in reply to

     @bob Ah, that makes a certain amount of sense.

     "...at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google now keeping logs of messages indefinitely."

     Well, that's bate and switch.

     Bob Mottram repeated this.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 09-Apr-2017 12:52:09 UTC Bob Mottram

     • :verified: Jeff Allen
     @profoundlynerdy yes. Change will only come when there's better education more broadly about open source, why free software is better than closed apps and what the business models of the various tech companies are. My impression is that more people are entirely unaware of those things and so that's why they make the choices they do.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 09-Apr-2017 13:18:40 UTC Bob Mottram

     • :verified: Jeff Allen
     @profoundlynerdy for example, if the knowledge that Google always needs the plaintext to as many things as possible in order to run its business model becomes commonplace, then it's easy to predict what that company will or won't do in the technology space. You don't need to know or understand any of the details.
     
     Pointing out that there are privacy concerns with US companies products is a lot more opaque, because then what is privacy? (hard to define) What are the concerns in detail? (baffling acronyms) etc, etc. You can see how with that line of argumentation the average person just turns off and carries on using WhatsApp, or whatever.
     
     Understanding that everything flows from the core business model is easier to grok.