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.
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.
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.
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.
(Translated from Firefox)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.
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.
Yep! That’s why net neutrality is so important.
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 😐
Also, that momentum was gained before whatsapp was bought by Facebook
Dumbfucks. Corporations will always be bought by worse corporations, and if you don’t understand that, you deserve to suffer.
Bingo, this is an anti-trust question
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…
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.
My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel)
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.
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.
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.
Yep this has been happening to me as well. I really want everyone to start using Signal but trying to convince people is like pulling teeth. It’s infuriating. WhatsApp fucking sucks.
I downloaded whatsapp because one friend back home used it and within the same day I was getting spam texts for the first time ever. Fortunately I convinced him to switch to signal and deleted that shit asap
Spam their public corporate accounts with complaints, in public comments. That’s the only way.
I’m hoping the age of self hosted chat platforms comes to fruition and I can get Meta the fuck out of my life, but it’s currently a hard sell between by friends
God what’s up sucks I hate it like so much anytime any of my clients request that I use what’s happened just makes me cringe so fucking much. Just let me text you like a normal person rather than using some third party bullshit app.
My weed dealer a few years ago got all paranoid and made his buyers start contacting him with WhatsApp. “It’s encrypted and completely secure!” Lol sure. It’s weird that the only other person who has ever made me use it was my realtor.
This is the reason you don’t ‘sign in with Google’ or Meta or whatever.
This is the reason digital infrastructure should be controlled by the commons. And punishment for misbehaving users should be decided by the state according to due process in a procedurally fair manner, not by corporations that seek to maximize profits.
I agree that is should just be a part of infrastructure like roads, but I’m not sure about the punishment. As long as people are prosecuted by local laws of residence, e.g. the laws might differ in my home country from the place you live. I don’t want to be judged by the puritan laws of the USA, which seem to be sliding backwards into what the christian religion says is okay. But we should take control away from the mega corporations before it is too late to do anything about it.
I don’t think that needs to be the case. At least in Sweden where I live, local laws apply whether you do something IRL or on the internet. For example slander is still slander even if you post it on Facebook. Meta doesn’t need to get involved any more than the phone operator or post office does.
Any email provider could do this
smaller providers are not so brave and quick with bans, or it would hurt their image. big providers don’t need to care about their image anymore.
We need to de couple from big tech before it’s too late.
There will only be big tech. It takes a lot of finances and relationships to even have a tech industry you’ll never have a mom and pop tech industry.
We need better politicians to deal with this shit
META wants more data from you, i would ditch the app.
fuck fb - also kinda waited to the last minute to find a new place, no? hope things works out for you
My 6 year old snap account for banned for “prohibited drug content” I’m Canadian and all I’ve ever done is share videos of me blazing to friends. Thankfully I have contact with the people that mattered via other means, still doesnt mean it doesn’t suck
You’re absolutely sure they won’t take a phone call about a quarter million dollar sale or whatever?
Yes I can call, but it‘s much less preferred as I‘m not a native speaker and it‘s easier for me to communicate in a written form, plus our timings can be different. Anyway I‘m not buying a house, I‘m just looking for a rental apartment, and in the country I live you can‘t pay to real estate agents for this purpose (it‘s prohibited). They are getting paid by the landlords instead, 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
I’d just SMS them and see if they respond. I mean, you’re setting up a viewing. That shouldn’t take that many messages.
I think you’ve got the power dynamic wrong here
If OP is having to contact loads of estate agents, it’s probably because they live somewhere with in-demand property.
That means those estate agents are going to have loads of potential people to sell to
Someone who wants to do something differently than everyone else is going to get a lower priority over someone who just does everything they are asked without question.
The estate agent doesn’t really lose anything by doing this, OP risks reducing their chances at getting a place, ostensibly one they need to live in at some point soon.
Living as someone who’s in a WhatsApp country, they absolutely won’t respond to texts. Nobody texts anybody, even old people don’t use SMS.
If I get an SMS I won’t even see it because I have notifications disabled because all I ever got was spam.
If it’s more than one person they may use Whatsapp for business with a direct channel without a phone.
I said whatsapp is not safe once. Glad (and horrified) to see I was correct. P2P encryption means nothing if the clients just report the data out via a side-channel once decrypted.
My take on this one (as a prospective home buyer) is that I don’t want to have to deal with real estate agents at all, particularly if they demand to be paid on commission; When they’re paid on commission, they benefit by being lazy and not attempting to negotiate down the price of the home. I home that real estate agents are automated away in the future.
Use Telegram, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix or one of the other alternatives…
Reading comprension of a fungus
I live in a country where literally all communication with real estate agents happens on WhatsApp
You can change things. I moved many of my friends and family from WhatsApp to Telegram.
That’s actually infuriating. The fact that the real estate landscape is based on Whatsapp should just be illegal. Don’t agree with whatsapp T&C? Go homeless. Do we need to remind who is whatsapp?
Same with cellular providers giving unlimited data on Whatsapp on a 25GB plan. Straight to jail.
Fuck Meta… What’s wrong with email? You’re free to choose your provider, and it’s more convenient than a mess of WhatsApp messages. All communication I’ve had with real estate agents in Australia has been via email.
Second time* I saw Meta mentioned here, did Meta buy WhatsApp?
Lol yes
Turns out, most of the globe is still charging out the ass for texting. It throws me off when hotels still closely guard their wifi and/or use access tokens.
