Fucking morons. I’ve been looking for a new apartment and messaging a ton of real estate agents lately, and WhatsApp just decided to block me for ‘suspicious activity.’ They already restricted my account a couple of days ago, and I almost missed an apartment viewing because of it. And I‘ve already done that for three moves before with zero issues. I live in a country where literally all communication with real estate agents happens on WhatsApp, so now I’ll have to go out tomorrow and get a whole new phone number if they don’t unblock me or Im gonna end up on the street. Fucking morons. Fuck you, Crapsapp, and your piece-of-shit messenger
Welp, here’s the thing. Real estate agents typically like getting paid. So I figure if you tell them “Hey, I don’t have whatsapp. Let’s email or text instead.”, they would do it, because a sale is a sale. They aren’t agreeing to give anything up. And it’s a very temporary situation from their perspective.
Also, I find it wild that meta (facebook), which owns whatsapp, controls the platform that an entire country relies on for any communication within an industry that dictates where you live. That is crazy. That feels like a lot of corruption must have had to happen for that to have happened.
WhatsApp has market share from the momentum gained in countries that didn’t have free/cheap SMS. I too find it wild that it’s the default in most of the world, and it’s super shady and super proprietary. The messaging that we have in the US is far far far from perfect, but at least it’s not Facebook Chat.
Also, that momentum was gained before whatsapp was bought by Facebook
Bingo, this is an anti-trust question
Plus in markets like Brazil, having unlimited use of WhatsApp services, including video calls, is a selling point for most cellular providers. You will have a data cap but could still video call your grandma on WhatsApp when you’re out of data. Every business has their WhatsApp number posted out front and on their websites/social media.
For example, here is Claro, a large Brazilian phone company’s cheapest current plan, 36GB of data but unlimited WhatsApp usage and 5GB for social media.
Crazy, in my county it’s almost the same but Tik Tok instead of WhatsApp
What the FUCK? Why would the providers do that?
It (potentially) allows them to charge at both ends. I don’t know if that’s what happens in Brasil specifically but it happens in a couple of countries.
The providers charge the users for the data use and the services for being exempt from the data caps.
I betcha this is the answer, they’re probably doing that as a deal with the telecom companies because WhatsApp what’s the market share and control, so that’s why they agree to it.
If you check who’s the topmost billionaire with a Brazilian nationality, you’ll likely find out part of why. Hint: he is portrayed in “The social network” film.
!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
We have one (I think) provider who does free WhatsApp traffic in Germany, but it never took of. WhatsApp itself is used a lot though.
Persobally I have 20 or 30 GB of data, not sure. I use like 3 to 4 each month.
For text communication surely it uses almost no data
If we could just get people to use Signal.
I’ve never used Whatsapp and never will do.
Team Signal since the time it was called Textsecure 🫡
Then again I don’t rely on Whatsapp to stay housed 😐
isnt wechat popular in asia.
In China for sure. I have no idea about other countries in Asia though…
Did some very light searching and it seems to be each country has it’s own thing going on. I know LINE is super popular but it’s mostly only in Japan (and kinda Korea too), while Korea has Kakao Talk. India and SEA region countries apparently love WhatsApp but Telegram does make up the lesser half of the traffic too.
But yeah WeChat and other Chinese apps have huge userbases but are pretty much only used by Chinese people. Hell, each country/region basically just uses their messaging app. Some of these apps have 97-99% of internet users and 90+% of the country’s ENTIRE POPULATION using that app to communicate. It’d probably be devastating if the service ever had a blackout for some reason.
The USA has a way bigger variety it seems, the highest market share for messaging apps is WhatsApp but only at 25%. The top 3 is WhatsApp, Discord (23%), and Telegram (20.8%). The other 30.1% of the market is a mosaic, Messenger, Snapchat, even Teams for some godforsaken reason. But hey, Matrix and Viber are 0.4%! At least they made the chart…
If you have 100 applications per apartment and only one wants to do it via e-mail, then we both know what’s going to happen.
I am so glad when I was looking for a house they were desperate to find buyers. I should have made them jump through hoops just to agree to look at a house.
In the country I live you can‘t pay to real estate agents (it‘s prohibited). They are getting paid by the landlords, plus the rental market is pretty scarce so usually they don‘t give a fuck about you as they have a ton of inquiries from other potential renters
Effectively, they are getting paid by you, landlords factors that fee into the rent. But I get the point that the market favours landlords where you live and you might not have the privilege to ask for accommodations like communicating over SMS. This WhatsApp situation is fucked up, that your basic life functionality depends on a single unaccountable commercial entity.
My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel) and you would practically need it just one time to get a verification code.
OP would also have to buy a new smartphone and activate it in a cafe or anywhere not their current location (due to both the GPS/AGPS and wi-fi hotspot MAC address), otherwise whatsapp would straight up lock the new account, too, given how these PII (geolocation, wi-fi hotspot and, especially, the device) are tied to an account that got suspended earlier (and this goes against most of plafforms’ terms regarding “ban evasion”). Hard resetting the smartphone doesn’t work, as smartphones have unique identifiers (such as the phone’s wi-fi adapter MAC), and using the same wi-fi may add to the factors leading to automatic locking of the account.
!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
They might be trying to detect ban evasion in various ways, but at least since Android 10 (released 2019), the OS restricts app access to non-resettable identifiers. That being said, Meta is known for dirty tricks, so simply using another phone number may indeed not be enough.
They’re also typically the laziest people in the world. The hate to expend any amount of effort and they don’t get much from commissions if it’s a rental.
When I was buying my house it took the sellers 5 months to sort out the paperwork. It took them any half a year to process the purchase of a single house.