WhatsApp: "you can now use email to access your account if you can't use your phone for some reason"
This community: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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People acting like a phone number isn't 100x more personally identifiable than email are delusional. I have like 700 unique emails atm, and can create a new one within seconds. I only have a few numbers.
In my country we're required to have our own identification tied to the number and we can only legally have a handful of number under a person name. Email is nothing lol.
I have a very, very old SIM card. It's from the 3G era, which means I miss out on my phone's 5G capabilities. However, when I went to buy a new card I found out you're required to take a selfie and send to the telecom company alongside your ID and email, which is creepy enough to keep me using my 3G SIM...
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I lived in a country doing that, and couldn't understand the people making social media profiles with their (actually traceable to a real life identity) phone numbers public. Don't you love receiving spam calls?
Funny thing is, there's a time where the hot topic is basically facebook eavesdropping conversation then put on ads with item relevant to the conversation. Everyone talk about it being creepy, but everyone keep using it without any change. I think they just don't care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have a catch-all address with a personal domain. Infinite aliases for free.
Hmm🤔 I use Migadu and could probably set this up -- is this actually a good idea?
A catch-all is not a good idea. But Migadu lets you do something called pattern rewrites which are aliases that can contain wildcards. So you can set up a pattern like shop-*@yourdomain.tld and use addresses like shop-amazon@, shop-etsy@ etc.
It doesn't have to be "shop" you can use anything you want and make up the pattern in any way you want ("ama.shop.zon@" or whatever you can think of).
It's better than plus addresses ("realaddress+amazon@") because it doesn't have to include your real address, and you can make a pattern that nobody can guess, but still retain the ability to use one address per site so you know who's spamming you, and you can make them up on the fly.
In fact I no longer use my "real" address for anything except logging into IMAP and SMTP, I use aliases or patterns for everything else.
Edit: If you want to also be able to send email from these addresses make sure to enable "wildcard sender" for the associated mailbox.
These addresses do have one downside similar to catch-all: if one of them starts getting spam you have to make an explicit deny rule for it. Some people contend that this is a messy approach and they'd rather make regular (non-wildcard) aliases and deny everything else. The downside with that however is that you can no longer make up addresses on the fly, you have to go to the Migadu admin to create the alias every time.
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how?
I use Proton Mail, which lets you make 'aliases', which you can use for different sites. The alias forward staright to your main (or a nominated) email.
You can use https://simplelogin.io/ to do the same, and I'm sure there are similar services around.
E.g. I can't have feckwhatsapp@feckfacebook.com as my WhatsApp email, and it would forward to whatever account I normally use.
I do this for pretty much everything on line, so they all have their own bespoke email for me.
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The problem is that they're reaching for emails in addition to phone numbers. Don't think for a second they're going to let you login with just email. They want email just to have yet another data metric to profile you with.
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My reeeing depends on if they are going to make it mandatory. And I have a feeling they are coming full force on the enshittification bandwagon.
Maybe they need it to link WA accounts to FB accounts.
Signal FTW.
I know Signal is technically better but Telegram provides a much better user experience than Signal or WhatsApp and is also less problematic than WhatsApp.
The problem with telegram is that it's not even e2e encrypted by default.
But the ui is really nice. I wonder why no other project simply forked telegram's client and focused on the encryption and server side code
Considering Telegram has partnered with Tencent, I wouldn't say it's less problematic.
You need to explicate the hell out of this cuz I vehemently disagree and point out, in terms of user experience its dogshit for me (but also implicitly that Telegram is conveniently insecure by default and even if you "encrypt", ifs a non-documented public slop version of messaging encryption [novel + security by obscurity]
Consequently, I would never be comfortable trusting it
What do you want expectorated, why IMO Telegram is less problematic than WhatsApp or why the UI is way better than Telegram or Signal? Cause they're very different things.
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Yep.
Telegram is a decent middle ground. UI/UX matters, I'm not sure how the folks at Signal are completely missing that point.
The Signal UI is OK, as a competitor to SMS. But it's terrible compared to Telegram. This matters to non-technical people, it's how you get them to use it. Plus the seamless connection between devices - that's crucial. I can chat using whatever device is in front of me.
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You mean instead of tying into a phone, right ?
The only point in time my lack of a phone number becomes an issue is for archaic stuff like this.
I am waiting for Cross Messenger Law of Europe it means that Signal and Whatsapp User can talk to each other.
If Whatsapp really wants to scare away there Users many are gonna switch because of the Email old persons have EMails but no clue how to use it.
Its easier to install another Messenger than EMail Verifikation.
I think Signal is against that because it compromises their security model. Also I think they aren't required by law to implement it but I'm not sure.
DDG proxy here I come
watsapp, fellow kidz?!
This sounds like what Element has been doing for years already. You can sign up with an email and optionally link a phone number to your account. When WhatsApp does it though, it's newsworthy.
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