Whatsapp/Viber and their stalkers/telemarketing friendly behaviour

Whatsapp and Viber are next generation of messengers. Who uses Yahoo, Gtalk or MSN messenger anymore? I guess not much of the population. Get a phone, enable data connection, install app and bang, you are connected to all of your friends in your phone. No hassles of finding who is on which messenger, mail id or anything like that. Just a phone number is all you need...Whatsapp seems to be replacing group medium like forums and mailgroups too. Make a group and gather online. Easy and near-online way to chatter, syncup and share things. Once live voice and video conferencing comes in, that could be another step.

With Whatsapp and Viber, I generically refer to similar family of messaging applications that are cropping up on various app stores. Whatsapp is used by me and many others that I know. So focus of this post remains on Whatsapp. Feel free to replace word Whatsapp with app of similar behaviour.

I have never been a fan of modern programming techniques, used by majority of Android and iOS clan. Call it generation gap and I would not mind too. Compare features on any old messengers and you would probably realise how half baked current software is. 

What Whatsapp and others dont tell you is the way it can affect you in a negative manner. Here's how...

These apps upload your contact list to their server. If your contact is on their records, its a match and you are connected. You can see that person online on your list and you can send a message right away. This is a convenience for stalkers/.

• All they need is the number of other person, add it and shoot messages, till they block.
• As long as the stalker doesnt send a message, he/she can see your display picture and status message. Depending on how much enthusiastic you are about your profile, you can give out good clues to them, about your name, gender, location and current activity.
• They can see it without you even knowing them. You wouldnt know who has added you on their list. There is no way you can find it out.
• You cannot prevent others from contacting you, you can block numbers but a determined person can use new numbers.
• An idle person doesnt need to know your number too, they can add any random number to their contact list and voilla, they can start.
• Telemarketers (in India atleast) can be banned from SMSing or calling you. Whatsapp broadcast storm is probably not under scope of DnD. Sooner or later telemarketers would start adding you on their contact list and spam with messages.

How can you save yourself?

Nothing much you can do beyond blocking people who approach, but...

• Change your display picture to a generic picture, use your favorite celebrity, cat, dog, motorcycle, car, building, road or whatever. This will attract less contact mining stalkers who randomly add you.
• Avoid putting detailed status messages, better yet, do not put one at all.

How the developers can help you?

• Build user's contact list on mutual existance i.e. only if two people have each other's number saved on phone. So unless you know each other, you cannot see each other online, till both want to be seen.
• By default block people who are not on your contact list. This will prevent random people from seeing you or contacting you or following you
  OR
• Allow people to send out invitation request in old fashioned way
• Allow users to choose if they wish to be contacted by people not on their list. If they select not to be, people can't send invitations.

As per mashable, As of June 20, 2013, WhatsApp has over 250 million active users, and handles 27 billion messages in a single day. There are already security concerns over your contact list lying on various servers and evesdropping poorly written apps that transmit plaintext data. Encryption can solve that to an extent but with every other app reading your contact list, you can't trust all, can you?

Why I dont dig Smartphones

Computing has come a long way since it started. History has proven that every new thing replaces the older and takes things higher, floppies gave way to hard disks, hard disks to SSD. Monochrome got replaced by color, crt by lcd, CLI moved to GUI and GUI aims to go touch way.

Its time for android and ios to play battle. I am no way an expert on both but having witnessed computing over years, I still feel these smartphones are still phones. They can replace the phone, but not the PCs yet.

Since I surrendered my workhorse thinkpad when I left job recently, I am without a laptop. All I have is this android slate with. I am trying to get things done, which I would normally do on a laptop. Results: few months on, and I am still struggling! Why? Lets see...

Touch
Its easy to type with swype, prediction but I still miss the pure full 3D keyboard

Nagware
Its based on open model, but free is no more free as in free beer. Suddenly every developer wants to blast you with free adware version or buy full version. Makes me think how these guys earned their living before. People used to write freeware and there were so many good ones. Looks like that word and culture is history now.

Behaviour/usability
One thing annoys me is the way wheel is being reinvented. There was a time when critics and fanatics fought over how a particular OS has bad GUI behaviour and how it requires x amount of more clicks to get a job done. Are they sleeping in their graves?

I am writing this post on a tablet, as I have moved beyond one page, simple stuff like formatting one word into bold or italics needs back and forth scrolling in blogger!
I haven't managed easy way in google mail app to select all mails in a click.
There is no standard way to layouts and most developers are creating their own. It can be easy for literates but try teaching a computer illiterate and you will know the difference.

Integration
Convergance is good for hardware but it leads to half baked software. Stuff that looks good on 4inch looks sparse on tablets. Folks its okay if you code specific versions for tablet or handheld. But try to write a one size fits all version and you mess both.
One example of half baked software apart from ones shared above is google maps. Nokia offerred a perfect solution for maps, full with offline maps, turn by turn navigation and route editing. Google maps cannot do offline maps for entire state or multiple countries. I have had tough time while trying to customise route. Then I created custom map on pc and sent link to googl maps on iphone. The app re calculated path and it was not same as its desktop counterpart. Nokia never had such issues and that phone was equally good at rest of the things.
On integration, bill gates was sued for integrating browser into OS. Now its defacto to have everything mixed into OS. There is no OS infact. The browser is os, os is camera and camera has file uploader. Anyone?

One button
Also obsession for one button is beyond me. Many pre android/ios smartphones had multiple buttons for camera, volume, audio controls and. On a newer phone its so frustrating to unlock and navigate just to change song. And with bigger tablets, holding one to click photo, especially self clicks is sure lame. Atleast give full keyboard on screen with shortcut keys or modern equivalent s of ,

Crappy multitasking
No other word, its not true multitasking yet. Its TSR way of multitasking. We are just stretching a phone screen concept to match what we do on a desktop. They blame it on lack of processing power but if today's calculatora can pack prehistoric supercomputers then smartphones can atleast pack a humble pentium, can't they?

Multiuser
First the computer was personal, then it became multiuser and now its back as single user. Couldnt anyone see this as a necessary feature? May not be on a phone, but on a a shared tablet in a family? Its going to be here but why was it lacking in the first place??

Open?
I can no more use one media to setup on different phones. its not what you do everyday but Imagine if you needed different OS media for your dell pentium and you have to wait for Dell to release it for your particular version. Or you are stuck with x version of ubuntu on your desktop since no one has ever written update for your hardware combo? Why a particular app wont run on samsung tab but can run on others flawlessly?
Interoperability was dealbreaker back in earlier days, many superior products died cause they were proprietary. Now no one bothers! Its so easy to switch devices than expect value for money and better programming.

Why can't manufacturer keep software and hardware seperate and focus on one of them. Ultimately there are no PCs and compatibles akin to old days, now there are note 1s, note 2s and blah blah. (I believe apple is bit different here)

Updates
Everyone complained how windows updates were annoying. Now updates keep coming every other day and that seems like a norm. We are no more users, we are beta testers for a product that never enters release.

Cloud
Every app assumes internet connectivity and thats kind of dangerous for your privacy. Someone said rightly, if you want to secure your data, dont connect your PC to the net. Now every bit is on net and you cannot know how many people see it.
You cannot use some basic apps if you do not connect to net and that freaks me out. One crappy software claimed video conversion. it uploaded every video to its server, convert it there and download it later #facepalm
Remember, clouds are in sky (net). Rings a bell?

Disclaimer
I do not make any claim that this is the final word. This is how I see things based on my usage. You are welcome to share your view or let me know how to get things done. Perhaps I am expecting too much from a phone.

PS
During the edits, somehow I can't see any bold formatted text. Unless I publish it, I wont know! And I am not bothered. This is my last post from an android.