this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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That is one good thing about america, whatsapp never caught
Yeahhh it's amazing, your choices are a closed platform that forces you to buy their expensive devices, or SMS, or another proprietary platform ran by a notorious privacy predator.
sms is fine.
SMS sucks. Not private and it handcuffs you to a phone. Who wants to type on a phone when you're at a real keyboard?
Sms has been god awful since the beginning, both the standard and the business implementation. Remember bullshit pricing models for texts? 10center per text over your limit. Even today, the standard hasn't kept up with modern times.
That's the only reason I started using Telegram. It might not be secure or whatever, but it sure is nice to have voice and video calling on a nice-looking desktop app. It's the only one I was able to get my family to use, and that I already had some friends using.
But I could never get them to use advanced shit like SimpleX or something similar lol. "But this already works?" Yeeeaaah but... Nah, it'll never fly. 😑
Sms is not encrypted, your service provider can read all your texts.
Theoretically anyone at the right point can read all your SMS texts.
A great example being the police "stingray tower" system that masquerades as a cell tower that your phone will happily (and quietly) connect to.
Convince a phone that you're just another authorized relay, have a target in mind, and it's like reading postcards before they hit the mailbox.
This is also why it's an absolute joke for 2FA, but institutions like banks still happily use it because it's easy to understand.
Not only easy to understand but for a while it was the only way to do 2fa that was usable by lots of people. Smartphones aren't as ubiquitous as people think, even today.
SMS's fall from grace wasn't actually that it could be intercepted, it was the fact it started being used as an excuse to ask for a phone number and use that to track people.
Google still won't allow you to use any form of 2fa if you don't give them a phone number. Twitch/Amazon too. Facebook used to (until they got Whatsapp, now they don't need to ask.) LinkedIn used to (until they got broken into so many times it became a humongous liability).