@Brendanjones Same when they force you to use Twitter for reach them

@Brendanjones

I would feel unsafe using Whatsapp 🙂

"Public systems should not require use of private services."

Yes. And less, if services are hosted outside of ones own legislation. I'm an #EU citizen and don't want to contact government or administration by using services outside of the union.

Just like #PublicMoneyPublicCode for #freeSoftware, we need a similar slogan for our #digitalSovereignty!

#PublicSystemPublicService or #PublicServicePublicSystem maybe, but both sound clumsy.

@Brendanjones I always wonder in these situations about old people, who may not even have smartphones or who might not find them easy to use

@Brendanjones Fully agree. Public systems should at least try to offer a service for communication that is widely compatible. For example a publicly hosted Matrix server with potential bridges to multiple different messenger services.

But even offering mail contact with a provided public key for E2E encrypted transfer would cause less centralization.

@Brendanjones I would have never even thought about it without Mastodon (though I've had to explain to private businesses like banks or my employer that I don't have a google account or use WhatsApp...) And it's made me realise that this is the one topic where 99% of politicians and public servants represents me fully: they're normies, just like me. Some more than me, some haven't gone past search=Google and email=Gmail. They don't have Mastodon so, like me, they've never thought about it.

@Brendanjones In that particular case, you can also use a regular text message.

Your point is still valid, though. No public systems should use private systems.

On the Dutch trains, the message should (at the very least) LEAD with text message, not Whatsapp.

@Brendanjones I absolutely abhor this situation. Local mayor's office meetings an FB live, US Consulate can ONLY be contacted on their FB page, and on and on.

@Brendanjones One perk of being American is that we can delete WhatsApp and there are no downsides (it makes our European friends annoyed but that is actually also an upside).

@Brendanjones

at least in the US, everyone "had" to have a phone and up until the 1970s or 80s this was a monoply run by MaBell and MaBell published a book, free to everyone, the white pages that listed the home address and phone number of everyone and it took a special request to be "unlisted"

@Brendanjones @briankrebs I appreciate that for something like that sometimes you have to meet people where they are.

What does drive me crazy is we get AMBER Alerts here for abducted children, that direct people to X links for more information, as if there aren’t an infinite number of other ways to post information on the Internet.

@Brendanjones I never used what's app since meta announced it buyed it.

And every company that ask me to use what's app or social to contact them i flew far away as they are not trusty enough to manage my data.

@Brendanjones very bad indeed. You are almost required to have WhatsApp, Facebook or X if you want to communicate. I only have WhatsApp, but I really don't want to use it for stuff like that, or anything else.

@Brendanjones at the same time, many of those are pretty convenient and someone pays for the other models. I would expect someone would want feature parity and similar support, availability... There's also the security challenges... I guess, it'd be nice but if it were practical, there'd be more of an open alternative and still requires some model of payment somewhere. What's any truly working model as such just open? Still paying for power, communications, discovery/adoption and equipment

@Brendanjones
👏👏👏👏

@Brendanjones Whatsapp has become a defacto standard. I don't like it.

So many small businesses have a phone number and next to it parentheses with "Whatsapp". Luckily, one can still text or call those numbers without using WhatsApp. So far, no one complained and has just texted me back.

But when government services require it it's a whole other level of annoying and wrong.

@Brendanjones #Tennessee Bureau of Investigations Amber Alerts show up as https://tbi.pub/alert that leads to a Facebook page, where, if one doesn't have the app or an account, one is forced to close the nearly full screen (on a small cell phone) dialog before being able to see a barely legible screen shot of a part of an infographic. Sure it looks fine on a desktop or my unfolded Pixel Fold, but YMMV.

Why not just use https://www.tn.gov/ and cross post to Facebook?

#Memphis

@Brendanjones RCS and SMS is right there.

@Brendanjones In the USA it is a largely held opinion that you are wrong: that government should hand all services over to corporate competition that will magically fix everything.

@Brendanjones It has been weeks now that NS has been putting train platforms full of their ads for their own (Meta/Zuck) Instagram account. The main slogan is "Discover hidden art" (Ironic and silly as Instagram hides the NS art for non Instagram users). Seems like NS did put quite some money into making these ads. And why ? To boost their Instagram followers amount ? Or is their a sincere plan ? #NS #Meta #Zuckerberg #privacy #navelgazing #trains #netherlands

@Brendanjones Damn I though only Romania did this kind of shit

@Brendanjones

Isn't there also some sort of local 'neighborhood watch' only through that platform?

@Brendanjones apart from the fact it's clearly insane for the government to use a (foreign!) for-profit service to facilitate communications for them... I always think to myself "what if I ran a WhatsApp alternative?". Like literally, what if I was the CEO of a competitor? I'd be so furious my rival was somehow getting this preferential treatment. It's so obviously wrong.

@Brendanjones

💯 agree

@Brendanjones
INDEED!

@Brendanjones that's 2nd order of gov forcing consumerism. The 1st one is that everything requires a smartphone and an app.

@Brendanjones Yeah, Governments and dare I say Brands should really either host their own instance or (esp for Brands) have a high quality commercial one to go to IMO. It's so fucking weird to still see Twitter logos on everything and the first and next 10 things you see on twitter are "WHY ARE THESE (slur) (slur) (dogwhistles) ALLOWED TO LIVE IN MY WHITE CHRISTAN NON-(slur) COUNTRY"

@Brendanjones in general I think the prolific requirement for tech sometimes overlooks people looking to be off the grid. Things like QR tickets for concerts or smartphone ordering during covid time basically meant if you were a dumb phone user or phoneless, you were the loser.

@Brendanjones So many companies still have "X" links on their web pages. Makes me doubt everything about them. Why should I buy from them?

@Brendanjones
While I agree with you I wonder if the term "private service" is still the right one. Even email, cell phone or the good old wired telephone are run by private companies in a lot of countries.

@Brendanjones They don't have to. There is Matrix instead of WhatsApp. There is mastodon instead of tw(a/i)tter/X. There is Lemmy instead of Reddit etc pp.

Public entities DECIDE to use Big companies. They decide to feed them and make them bigger.

And as long as there is no change in mind, this will continue.

@Brendanjones I work for an org that would probably describe itself as championing social justice causes.

I just can't reconcile that goal with buying wholesale into any monopoly, not least those that are privately controlled and can have a huge influence on public discourse.

But I'm not aware of any of my colleagues thinking like that. 🤷🏽‍♂️

@Brendanjones Yep, this drives me mad over here in Argentina too.

Many government services use WhatsApp, and many utility companies use Twitter as the official contact portal. I hate it and refuse to use them, but at the end of the day I have worse services for it.

@Brendanjones the problem is less a private company than a GAFAM

@Brendanjones It is not possible to avoid private services because the entire telecommunications network is private. The distinction that you are after might be regulated versus unregulated services but the reality seems to be that government services should be provided by multiple means to accommodate the wide range of ways people communicate.

it seems that the Dutch government is already doing that; they just haven’t effectively told you the options.

@Brendanjones I get it, but where would you draw the line these days? Unless they give you your phone or Internet service, you've no choice without doing it all in person and/or by mail.

What's worse for me is when they put information on a site that's essentially not viewable without an account, like X or some of FB. Especially when they have a functioning website that just links to it (they should be doing the reverse!)

But I absolutely get it.

@Brendanjones Same with German police when you read they are finally leaving Xitter. And then you read on that they are moving to WhatsApp Status messages. 😭

@Brendanjones This is hardly news. People just assume that #gafam are *the* platform to do the thing, and if you don’t comply, you’re just being particular and weird. Look at how pervasive YouTube has become in education. Can you imagine ad-ridden videos being fed to children in state-run public schools? It’s ordinary reality for most teachers, to they point they would feel deprived of a didactic tool if administration dared blocking it. At least in my cursed country, that is.

@Brendanjones A few years ago I had a shipment problem & failed to get the attention of the national mail service through all their official support channels - only finally getting help when I @'ed them on Twitter... pissed me off even then; getting help was fine but the avenue was F'ed.

@Brendanjones I feel like the DMCA and eventually the DSA will have unintentionally fostered a lot of the FOSS community. #nextcloud is like the poster child of FOSS projects that have benefited from how EU organisations interpreting the laws. Even if laws aren’t aimed at pushing the state to use FOSS, if they’re structured a certain way it can benefit FOSS projects unintentionally.

@Brendanjones play store tags WhatsApp as available for people older then 12.

Guess younger people are not supposed to feel scared.

@Brendanjones
I'd like to publicly thank one of my State Representatives @egallager for pushing this issue with our State.

Here's hoping we can push again next session, and this time cross the finish line.

@Brendanjones

That's like
"Feeling unsafe in the train?
Just call Mark Zuckerberg!"

Uh ... nope

@Brendanjones Couldn’t agree more. It is ridiculous to require citizens to use specific apps that have their own privacy policies to engage with government or get services. Schools in the #USA are horrible in this regard. Like they totally ignore if you “opt out” of your child’s images being used and just use it for advertising.

@Brendanjones Here in Brazil there’s a highway which used to give real time status updates through Twitter. When I stopped using twitter after it became X, I just couldn’t see the highway status. Had they made a website/rss feed or whatever it would be way more accessible.

Then cut ahead a few months when X was banned and now they don’t offer real time updates at all.

@Brendanjones the problem is "public" URLs are always a foot and a half long, unmemorable, hard to type and not working half the time. And a lot of public and quasi-public agencies see no problem with that.

@Brendanjones @Gargron I get that, but I also remember the 2007-2010 era when smartphones were blowing up and every government agency was trying to make their own apps.

Yeah, I hate WhatsApp too – but it’s better than downloading the NYC “Say Something” app, creating another account, and texting them there.

They should just support SMS, but I also understand why that’s untenable at scale.

@Brendanjones A strategy for protecting at least some of your info is to use wrong details for things like your birthday (keep a list), and alternative email addresses for specific purposes (you can create a system of forwarded emails so you get alerts, etc.), and other things like that that are annoying but can protect some of your personal details.

@Brendanjones One could argue it's a form of regulatory capture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

On the other hand, you have a significant amount of citizen using this service as their primary communication channel, so you might meet them where they are, in order to be useful.

We are in a bit of a pickle with the way the internet is currently shaped.

@Brendanjones I have similar thing with Facebook. So many especially small area public services that only seem to exist on Facebook and the only way to contact them is through there. I'm sure it was a sane idea for those early Facebook "everyone is here" moments, but I for example don't have a personal social media at all and have very little interest getting caught in it knowing the thing only exists to sell information about us.

@Brendanjones Putting together a federated instance would cost a government no more (or much less/fewer) resources than dedicating a crew to run an account on a private product, and greatly reduce co-optation by private entities. Put all your wildfire updates on the fediverse and folks WILL find you.

@Brendanjones governments rely on a number of private services for public facing service. Including, phone companies, internet service providers or, in some jurisdictions, mail delivery. Ideally, the government should meet the people it is serving where they are. That said, access to public services should not rely on a single service, that has no regulatory oversight (like WhatsApp). If it is a platform they want to utilize, it should be one of many, and it should have regulatory oversight.

@Brendanjones
Yes. Worse is NS are, with that, recommending people join Whats App. And showing approval of What App. So unenlightened people will naturally join it.
They might be thinking, "go where the people are". But in reality it is "send people to join Whats app". The "closed" network effect.
It's this institutional incompetence that is driving the social media descent into a toxic world.

@Brendanjones oh, I know situation way worse. Even during the war, Ukrainian goverment force you to use telegram for communication with local gov services. And for whom telegram is transparent database we all already understand for years. 🥲

@Brendanjones It's an eternal struggle. Because If you are the government, one important aspect of this is picking a communication method that most of your citizens use. If you feel in danger on the train, the last thing you would want is a hard time communicating the issue.

Short of them hiring their own developers to develop their own communication app, for both Apple and Android, they'd have to use some alternative communication method that is owned by somebody else.

@Brendanjones I'm happy for public bodies to integrate with anything and everything as an *option* to reach more people, but there should ALWAYS be an accessible option: one that doesn't require agreeing to terms, available via an API so anyone can make their own client usable by people with a disability you've never even heard of, etc...

@Brendanjones There are a lot of "neighbourhood watch groups" that operate on WhatsApp and are part of some towns official signage, super weeeiiird 😅

@Brendanjones the US Amber alert system (child abduction alerts) many times use twitter to relay the message)

It because so ubiquitous that it was used for public emergencies.

But I have to have an account now to view tweets?!? Nope nope nope.

So now I usually look up those bits on other news sources.

All in all, I love Mastodon (to the point where I’ve started paying for hosting, because I like having my own custom emoji)

@Brendanjones Yes, lots of companies do that here too, drives me crazy!!

@Brendanjones @Brendanjones same here in german Trains, everywhere "need something? sent a Whatsapp!"

As far as i know the reason is that Whatsapp offers commercial packages that are "turn the key" solutions, so a company just buys the package from Whatsapp and gets a full software suite for their end to use including all service and support.

@Brendanjones Specifically for WhatsApp, I am kind of naive and still hope that the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) will manage to force them into actually interoperating/federating with 3rd parties in some genuinely useful fashion.

Ideally (aka "And I want a pony, who's actually an unicorn") I would like this to be by forcing them to open gateway servers that run standard protocols (like matrix).

@Brendanjones but what is the solution? Mastodon is still not nearly as popular as WhatsApp, and it’s also not real time communication.

I get the point and I agree with it, I wonder if a good solution is out there.

@Brendanjones my power company wants me to contact them via X. Mad. No way

@Brendanjones in Costa Rica EVERYTHING happens through Meta... neither the public services nor the private businesses can easily be reached out of WA, IG or FB...

@Brendanjones I'm fine with WhatsApp. What I'm not fine with is the text that you can only talk with someone on WhatsApp if you're also using WhatsApp.

I'm a bit sad that the EU ruling which demanded chat apps being interoperable didn't pass. I would love to use telegram to message people using WhatsApp.

Or any other OSS service for that matter.

@Brendanjones
Totally agree!

@Brendanjones Did you find any non private-company-led phone yet? I think the issue is not that a service is company operated or even commercial-for-profit, but that the company is not using a set of interoperable communication standards and you are therefore locked-in to the specific vendor.

@Brendanjones _strictly speaking_ the number should™ also work with plain old SMS, but that doesn't detract from the sentiment, and I fully agree

@Brendanjones I don't use WA and that's a growing problem by the day.

@Brendanjones
Indeed.

So far, I’m still boycotting WhatsApp. Not to protect my privacy, but because Meta gave us President Trump.

@Brendanjones Honestly, I feel like this is the one thing that the UK government has absolutely nailed over the last twenty years. The gov.uk services are a rare show of public services done very well.

@Brendanjones @jamesbow

While an sms option is nice, folks need to recognize that it isn't just that the gov't recommends WhatsApp or YouTube or Facebook etc, but more than it being simply 'corporate' every last one of these sites now REQUIRES a login before disclosing ANY content, and that ACTUALLY means you grant "consent to being tracked and consent to them selling that info to anyone with the cash, and without your knowledge"

@Brendanjones sound scammy

@Brendanjones I fundamentally oppose using private companies systems for public services. But I know how this goes: The government builds its own app which is terrible and often broken and full of security holes or they build a really good app but it costs a large amount of money and people wonder why the government is spending so much on something as "simple" as an app. It's a lose-lose situation. I'm not saying that it's right or even we should accept this. It is frustrating.

@Brendanjones I've gone off about this for so long now, while people write me off as a crank for doing so.

Democratic gov't has no business not making all their means of communication on publicly-owned servers, and done accessibly.

Far too many gov'ts in the US use Facebook as their main means of communicating with the community and also don't make it accessible. #CivicTech #Accessibility #a11y #Privacy

@Brendanjones
True

@Brendanjones On top of that, I'm imagining how time-consuming it would be to download a new app and create a new account while feeling unsafe on the train.

@Brendanjones This! I haven't seen such a blatant breach of boundaries yet myself but I'm hearing all the time of teachers sending homework via private apps, schools having group chats on WhatsApp etc. It's unacceptable that teachers or other public servants force people to hand over their data and contacts to Meta or any other such company. I wish I had a way of preventing others giving these companies my contact info when they use the services, never mind using them myself.

@Brendanjones Imagine the society practically forcing people to use Windows in some form. My government was doing that, although I think it's marginally better now.

I personally think that kind of decisions is coming from a total ignorance of why they are there as public servants.

@Brendanjones the British Transport Police have a text number you can use. It's really that simple.

@Brendanjones @Shabablinchikow I don't think "government-mandated apps" is a way to go

@Brendanjones It’s everywhere. These “WhatsApp neighborhood watch” signs can be found all over the Netherlands.

@Brendanjones A perfect example of how much our world is privatized!
In ancient Greek time people gather and discuss things on free and public plazas. Just a few years ago people communicate with each other via national postal companies.
And now our personal and public life is so much dependent on private and for-profit businesses. They exploited our privacy. They manipulated our source of information. And we hv no power controlling our necessary tools.

@Brendanjones
Contact them, report that needing to use whatsapp makes you feel unsafe 🧐

@Brendanjones
This.
I use the official government site to fulfill my duties dictated by the law. I have to download and fill out a form in Microsoft Word format (not even docx!).
All documents should instead be in an accessible, open format. Either text, or pdf, markdown, whatever. I want to be able to choose what platform and program I use to consume data.
It authorities force me to use a platform that shows me ads, the impartiality of that government should be questioned.

@Brendanjones

This was my initial excitement with Matrix! Finally, a tool government can own which we can all connection with!

My excitement is much-tempered, but both France and Germany are using it in official capacities.

Hopefully more will, too.

@Brendanjones I deleted my WhatsApp account two months ago. So far no incidents.

@Brendanjones 🎯

@Brendanjones
Microsoft constantly reminding me to log in to my account & use their browser!!!

@Brendanjones The sad part is that they are likely being user-friendly by using services like WhatsApp because the population at large uses them and those who don't happen to be the "odd man out".

@Brendanjones FOSS awareness is a good thing.

@Brendanjones btw whatsapp is the favorite of pig butchers.

@Brendanjones Most importantly, social media should be required to support federation to enable government services to be available to everyone no matter what service they decide to use.