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Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History?

 1 year ago
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/22/0443227/can-consumers-break-free-of-the-tech-industrys-hold-on-their-messaging-history
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Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History?

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The Washington Post reports on "a relatively young app called Beeper that pulls all your chats into one place." This is significant, the Post argues, because "we're better off if we have the freedom to pick up our digital lives and move on. Tech companies should feel terrified that you'll walk if they disappoint you..."

If different people send you messages in Apple's Messages (a.k.a., iMessage), WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Slack, you don't have to check multiple apps to read and reply. Maybe the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone for another company's device and keep your text messages...

Eric Migicovsky, Beeper's co-founder, told me that if you're pulling Apple Messages into Beeper, you need a Mac computer to upload a digital file. All chat apps have different limits on how much history you can access in the app.

There's also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper. (Add yourself to the list here.) The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features.

To put this all in context, the Post's reporter remembers the hassle of using a cable to transfer a long history of iPhone messages to a new Google Pixel phone, complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system. "Many of you are happy to live in Apple's world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible..."

They look ahead to next year, when the EU "will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors" — though it's not clear how much change that will bring. In the meantime, the existence of a small company like Beeper "gives me hope that we don't have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system... You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment's notice."

  • ›

    So just as all the messaging apps are fighting against weakening security, along comes this app which we have to hand over control to all our messaging apps to use?

    Righto.

    • Re:

      Even if they have perfect security, what is their privacy policy? If I don't pay them for my use of their app, who does pay them, and for what?

      • Re:

        You really didn't need to go any further than that...

        But yeah - here we have yet another group of leeches attempting to "helpfully" inject themselves right into the middle our personal stuff.

  • Sorry to come back with this old adage, but that's just it. Text messages are by definition a transient way of communicating. They're useful to convey a message, but they are by no means a sensible way of storing messages. Twice so because it's virtually impossible to organize them sensibly in most of these media.

    • Re:

      Yes and I routinely clear out my text messages, and phone log, after conversations are done, so my histories are always empty. Don't really understand keeping that stuff around.

      On a related note, I see reports of people getting their phones seized by the FBI -- recently, many lawyers for a certain former President:-) -- so LEO can review all their messages and wonder what they keep on those phones. Mine would be, basically, empty. Perhaps lawyers are required to retain things, anyone know? I know t

      • Re:

        Yes and I routinely clear out my text messages, and phone log, after conversations are done, so my histories are always empty. Don't really understand keeping that stuff around.

        I'm retired now, and don't have to worry about that kind of thing. But if I were working at a job where having my phone/text/chat records seized was a possibility, I'd clean them out too, but not completely because that just tells the cops that you have something to hide. I'd clean them out selectively, nuking anything that mig
    • By young kids I mean people 40 and younger given slash dots age group. My kid uses iMessage like a kind of mini social network. It's one of the main reasons they're locked into Apple. And I'm sure apple is fully aware of that and if this application takes off to any degree they'll find a way to undermine it. Similar to what Twitter is trying to do by banning competitors from posting to their site but a lot more sophisticated because apple is just plain better at what they do than Twitter is

      • Re:

        Apple already undermines it by the method I've mentioned in my earlier post. The only way to get a phone number associated with an Apple ID is by having that number active on an iPhone. It's basically the opposite problem that people were having back in the day when they'd switch to an Android phone and Apple's iMessage servers took their dear sweet time unregistering their phone number. In this case though, it's that all the iPhones in the wild have no idea that your number is capable of receiving iMess

  • Why have all AlM, ICQ, and MSN installed when you can just use Pidgin?
    https://www.pidgin.im/ [pidgin.im]

    Very revolutionary stuff going on here.

    • Re:

      AIM? ICQ? Did you hop out of a portal from 20 years ago?

      I suspect you are being facetious, though, in which case I will at least acknowledge I appreciate the joke! Trillian did that once upon a time as well.

      • Re:

        Trillian did that once upon a time as well.

        Did Zaphod know about it?

    • Re:

      In the old days, you didn't have a centralized notifications center. On modern smartphone OSes, it really doesn't matter whether a message comes in through iMessage, SMS, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp, etc. You tap on the notification and you're immediately taken to the appropriate app where you can respond. There also doesn't seem to be any performance penalty to having messaging platforms installed on a modern smartphone, either. We've come a long way from the days of where h

  • To use a real keyboard with iMessage without having to buy into Apple's infrastructure any more than necessary. If somehow this results in that, great. The hate for touch keyboards is strong in those of us with sausage fingers.

  • If I want my messages history, I can archive it. I can copy it, I can paste it.

    However those messages have already served their purpose I don't need them. Anything I did need from them , I have already recorded into a more convenient local storage and backed up off site in a better curated presentation for later review.

  • "Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry's Hold on Their Messaging History?"

    It just sounds like, Can consumers give another tech company access to all their messages?

    • Re:

      On the up side, it would mean people only have to beat you with one wrench [xkcd.com] to get access to everything, rather than several wrenches to get access to multiple accounts.

  • Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.

    It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.

    Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!

    * $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.

    Don't wait for your contact to "expire"

    No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.

    What makes a good text coms system:
    Global interoperability
    portability
    adherence to open standards
    Reliability
    store & forward
    Local storage and background sync
    fast, indexed search
    save draft and resume later
    structured formatting
    Organizational mechanisms like folders
    centralized directory

    What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.

    If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://support.delta.chat/t/a... [delta.chat]

  • of the tech industry's stranglehold on everything?"

    There. FTFY.

    On and yeah:

    No. Not anymore. It's too late.

  • Okay let's be honest here. Q2 '22 US Market share was: Apple: 48%, Samsung: 30%, and Motorola: 9%. With pretty much the rest being ~1% or less. No one is going to another phone maker because they're afraid they'll lose their text messages. And the reason? Did every one forget this? [slashdot.org] Does anyone think that a person who cares more about blue versus green bubbles actually has the rational thinking required to understand "portable messages"? This pitch is so far over these peoples collective head that it

  • Isn't Beeper technical part of the tech industry?

    Also, from Beeper's website:

    Call me a cynic, but in 2023, when a company proposes to unify all my messaging histories and promises not to misuse my data, somehow they sound even sketchier than if they didn't promise anything.

    Cuz I'll tell you one thing: they can promise all they want, I'm not giving a single, unknown for-profit permission to access all my data. Hell no!

  • Beeper was started by a wealthy tech guy (previously of Pebble and Ycombinator), so that's why you're hearing about it.

    There has already is a free, secure method of using iMessage on Android: Airmessage [airmessage.org] The catch is, just like Beeper's requirement, you need a machine running macOS. Because you're self-hosting a server with Airmessage, your home ISP also has to provide a routable public IP address, which isn't necessarily as common as it used to be (carrier grade NAT is a thing these days).

    I actually ran t

  • A number of apps have tried this in the past - Disa is one that springs to mind. As soon as it became popular, WhatsApp and Facebook stopped their services working with it. Even the services that did work were severely limited, meaning that you had to go to the actual platform to do anything other than text.

    The whole point of these apps is to lock you into their eco-system, and they have no incentive to let another app sit in the middle.

  • I run a wireguard VPN, p2p encryption for all devices, cloud services, and have a 100% opensource infrastructure, and every astute customer's first question is: if I switch from Apple/Google to Zenfoil, can you read/see my data?

    The answer, of course, is, whoever holds the encryption keys can read/see the data. So that is a bit of a dodge, I know, but it's true. I hold the keys.

    I train my customers to use Veracrypt to do their own encryption, and if they can get their head around it, then they are satisfied.

  • "the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone"

    Why the hell would I want to get rid of my iPhone? Did a third mobile OS recently become available?


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