You may have heard that Facebook is buying WhatsApp for $18 billion. I thought it worthy to investigate, being totally uninpressed with Firechat.
They claim 400 million users worldwide are sending 100 billion messages per day. In countries like the US where phone companies still hope to get you to pay $2000 per MB for SMS messages, Or Apple offers a proprietary free iMessage service that locks you into using an iPhone, WhatsApp is free* [for the first year] and just uses your general cell phone 2/3/4G data
It seems to work quite well. My friend in California chatted a bit, and I found a computer guy from Chicago uses the app (to talk to his hot babes back in India)
The shocking part had nothing to do with the app. One of the abilities is to send pictures to the other person. When I clicked on the photo library, I was startled to find all the pictures from my Windows PC available. As you may know, my windows XP PC is no longer running Windows and the windows logical drives are unmounted.
What that immediately communicated to me was that Apple has uploaded all of my pictures that I’ve ever taken to the iCloud. Multiple times. On the iPhone, upload all my pictures was on by default! Presumably, the same is true for iTunes on the Windows PC. This is exactly the kind of setting I would never enable if I was presented with an option.
There are no pictures there that would get me in trouble, but I certainly wouldn’t want some of them published on the front page of the New York Times. Once they’re in the cloud, there ain’t no way to ever be sure they’re gone.
Caveat emptor.
My next mobile device will probably not be an Apple product.
I knew it was a good thing to have resisted taking photos with my old, antiquated cell phone, or to upload anything into the clouds.
Something about this story really bugs me. It may be the photos on the cloud without your knowledge or consent, or it may be this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeVtZjGII-I
1984 comes – a bit late, but Apple and Google lead the way.