Have you considered the alternative?

Thu 09 March 2017

“Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product. […] When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say ‘Have you considered the alternative?’“

Brian Acton and Jan Koum, June 2012

“Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares.”

Facebook Newsroom, February 2014

“[B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them.”

Brian Acton and Jan Koum, August 2016

Pattern Recognition

WhatsApp started out full of dreams: “we want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake…and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement”. When they thought of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum were very keen on not selling our user data for targeted advertisement purposes. So they charged a nominal rate for the use of their service, rightfully pointing out the hidden cost of using free services.

In the year of 2014 however, WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, thus joining the social network’s happy and expanding family of venture capital investments, a family including Instagram, purchased in April 2012, and Oculus VR, purchased the month before. At the time, many, and with good reason, worried about the changes this acquisition could entail for WhatsApp. Eventually, in August 2016, WhatsApp users everywhere learned about what was in fact unavoidable. The company that built its reputation upon an ad-free ethic, would now be sharing private user information with Facebook, its parent company. So we, the users, are the product after all, and as expected, this is presented in the form of an improvement of the user experience. Thanks to the tighter coordination between WhatsApp and Facebook, we can now more easily find our friends or see more valuable messages from the companies that truly matter to us. Of course, small footnote, these ‘benefits’ comes at the price of sharing our phone number and other private data with Facebook—though, trusting their word, not the content of the messages themselves.

Facebook does this for the simple reason that it needs to increase its market share on mobile devices; the family of Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram are all different channels leading to this same purpose. One of the consequences of this is that while Facebook’s chat function can still be used on their mobile website, plans are that we will soon be forced to install Facebook Messenger should we wish to continue using it on our mobile phones. Once again, in a stroke of pure genius and creativity, this move is being marketed as a way to provide us with the best experience ever. And we can use it with just a phone number, we don’t even need a Facebook account. That way, their user base expands along with their profits.

Every time there is a breach of user trust —read: a change in the Terms of Service— or news regarding network surveillance, people are on the lookout for an alternative, and rightfully so. In these moments there are many also willing to promote such alternatives, usually in the form of yet another disruptive app. After the purchase of Whatsapp, for example, Telegram was advertised as the alternative. After it became clear that Telegram had dreadful security, people promoted Viber. Then Snapchat, then Threema, then Allo and now Signal. There is a reason why we’re falling into this pattern of needing alternatives to the alternatives. And that is because…

There are no alternatives.

There’s a tendency to oversimplify the issues related to the use of these apps as merely a privacy matter, and not even that is sufficiently addressed. While each of the aforementioned apps are alternative companies and brands, what these alternatives all have in common is that they share the same model. A model that revolves around centralized services, vendor lock-in and marketing related surveillance, and all of that within a neoliberal context of the free market. These alternatives therefore promote themselves as more than just an alternative, but also as competing products, usually highlighting a particular feature lacking in rivals’ products. Remember that ill-fated, super cool, nice looking alternative to Facebook, Ello? It gained a lot of traction out of legitimate concerns with Facebook’s modus operandi, promoting itself as an alternative for its nice features and its promise not to use advertising. But as Aral Balkan was quick to point out, allowing investments by venture capital firms meant the project was dead before it really began. Taking these investments, which allowed them to scale as a platform, also meant that they would, at some point, have to make a lot of money for their investors. How? By selling ad space or information about their users. The reason the pattern keeps repeating itself is not because the makers of these apps always secretly intended to sell your data while saying they wouldn’t. The reason is that they have no choice within the economic system they choose to operate in.

Cryptography matters, but then it also doesn’t

The latest competitive feature—one might even say, marketing trick—to make concerned users switch from one alternative to another is cryptography, the act of coding messages during communication. This strategy works well because the vast majority of people are not really informed when it comes down to the technicalities of cryptography, so this discourse mostly serves to throw bedazzling sparkles in our eyes. To be sure, cryptography is fundamental for privacy. However, the main privacy threat in the context of using these apps isn’t the potential of a government eavesdropping on our communications. The privacy threat is the wholesale and increasing dependence on centralized services which revolve around the surveillance and monetization of user information. In 2016, both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger enabled end-to-end encryption? to address increasing privacy concerns. Adding crypto to a communication app in this case merely obfuscates a concern about the hegemony of these platforms. In essence, the issue of privacy is much larger than just the lack of cryptography; the conditions that threaten privacy are structural and economic and not resolved by a patch or a new feature.

This issue is further stressed when looking at the question of metadata, that is to say, data about data, which in the case of communication applications is everything but the communication data itself. When WhatsApp started sharing, among other things, its users’ phone numbers with its parent company, Facebook, it went to great lengths to guarantee us that the content of our messages was still perfectly secure, impossible to be read by both WhatsApp and Facebook. The argument stating that “It’s only metadata, don’t worry” has been however debunked numerous times. Even though these platforms would love us to believe otherwise, metadata is neither a trivial disposable by-product, nor it is anonymous. And assuming that the crypto is sound and that the app running this crypto is not flawed, cross-referencing several databases containing metadata will always produce an array of very personal information, that in itself is much more valuable than encrypted naked selfies. Thus it should be no surprise that former NSA director Michael Hayden infamously said in 2012 “we kill based on metadata” and later argued in 2015 that metadata should be the main area of focus of surveillance activities, and not the creation of backdoors within crypto, or the banning of the latter.

In short, both Whatsapp and FacebookMessenger can afford to deploy end-to-end encryption for your messages because it won’t hurt their bottom line, which is making money based on the surveillance of your behavior and your social graph. Adding crypto thus merely patches your privacy worries, but not the threat to it.

The Wrong Signal

The end-to-end encryption enabled in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger has been developed by Open Whisper Systems, a non-profit run by crypto-celebrity Moxie Marlinspike. OWS also developed the algorithm for their own instant messaging application, Signal, and then open-sourced it. Signal itself is now the latest app being promoted as an alternative to WhatsApp and is hailed as the panacea of both security and usability. It even has the backing of members of the dissident elite such as Edward Snowden.

While OWS provides thorough expertise in the field of cryptography, Marlinspike is currently advocating centralisation as the only answer towards user-friendly, fast and secure messaging apps. Decentralisation, according to him, has no place in the modern world and apparently hampers innovation. However, some of his arguments have not remained unchallenged. In particular, where Marlinspike accuses federation of stalling evolution, Daniel Gultsch provides a counter argument by using the Web as an example of successfully federated system?. Furthermore, Gultsch states that the problem is not that federation doesn’t adapt, but rather that there are problems with its implementation for a very significant reason: software developers working on federated systems mostly work for free in their spare time or with little means, given the difficulty to monetise a system which design can only succeed if it is open and can be appropriated easily beyond its original scope, and thus making its capitalisation particularly challenging. In that sense, the most interesting aspect of this debate is that while Marlinspike seems to defend his product from a technological perspective, Gultsch’s counter argument moves back the discussion to the context of political economy.

Daniel Gultsch is an important counter-voice because he is the main developer behind Conversations?. This open-source instant messaging app tries to be both accessible for new users as well as provide enough flexibility for more advanced users. In that regard, Conversations itself does not manage to escape the logic of competition and the discourse around alternative superior apps discussed previously. However, its approach is significantly different because unlike any other apps, Conversations is not a complete solution, nor does it present itself as such. It is a client that relies on federation, which means that it allows for people to chat with each other regardless of what provider they are using. In concrete terms, there is no central server directly connected to Conversations, but Conversations can connect to different chat servers. This is possible because Conversations is built upon a long-lived messaging protocol called XMPP?.

XMPP, the federated messaging protocol

Up to a few years ago XMPP and its implementations were lagging behind in terms of mobile features, usability and interface design. That was the so-called lack of evolution Moxie pointed out. But recently Gultsch and the other contributors to Conversations have managed to bring XMPP up to speed with the functionality of well known mobile messenger applications. Not only did this demonstrate that bridging the gap could be done technically, but it also had the effect of breathing new life into the XMPP community. An example of this new energy was the initiative to create and implement OMEMO?, an XMPP Extension Protocol? that provides multi-user end-to-end encryption and which is based on Signal’s own encryption algorithm. Ever since a growing number of clients have started implementing OMEMO, including Gajim? for desktops and ChatSecure? for iPhones.

Gultsch succeeded so far precisely because of understanding the technical underpinnings of centralized services? such as WhatsApp or Signal. It is however a bitter-sweet victory, because as Gultsch articulated in his defense of decentralisation, the main difference between centralised and decentralised implementations is not only technical, but also a matter of economic sustainability. In other words, if his ongoing efforts show that it is possible to have a satisfying and safe user experience while using federated alternatives, this is only possible because, unlike any other XMPP client developers, he is in the position of working on this project full time. The problem has not been solved but shifted.

If economically sustainable XMPP federation were to scale to the point of being as successful as the centralised solution offered by Signal, it would have to face the consequences of doing so in the context of a free market driven by competition. In that situation, each XMMP client’s economic viability would depend heavily on its capacity to capture enough users that can provide income for their developers. The problem therefore is not so much a problem of the technical or economical sustainability of federation, but more a problem of the economic sustainability of open standards and protocols in a world saturated with solutionist business models. After all, many years ago, Google and Facebook did provide XMPP support in their chat applications before deciding to close its interoperability.

Approaches not Apps

Given the different problems mapped in this text, it becomes difficult to blindly recommend Conversations as the superior alternative, that is to say, a near drop-in replacement to Signal or any other competing secure communication software. The reason is not technical but is linked to the fact that, as discussed earlier, Conversations’ own success relies on an economic model that is quite fragile, and the success of which—and it’s a paradox—could potentially undermine the cultural diversity of the XMPP ecosystem. With that said, there are however two essential points that the Conversations case brings up. These points are not always articulated clearly in discussions on federation: scale and trust.

Rather than having to swap one app for the other in an attempt to mitigate a large and confusing privacy problem, the XMPP federation approach allows to collectively tackle the problem based on its various discrete parts. Such an approach, rather than suggesting a singular and proprietary solution, allows for the existence of different free and open source software servers which can be combined with different free and open source software clients. That makes it possible for you and a group of friends to run your own infrastructure, whether on a rented server or on a very small home server.

The federated nature of the protocol allows you to try, play and experiment with different network infrastructures with different clients. These clients can range from custom XMMP bots to general instant messengers that you would be able recommend your friends and family to replace Whatsapp, without making a fool of yourself. As these open-source technologies continue to evolve you can make incremental changes to your server or switch clients as newer versions arrive.

Hosting your own infrastructure allows you to scale your communication in a way that is the most meaningful for the group or community you belong to. It is also a way to make sure your system matches your own threat model?, while simultaneously allowing you to deal with trust that is not mediated by an app. It also allows you to experiment with economic models other than those linked to large-scale infrastructure involving surveillance and capturing of your social graph for financial gain. Maybe you want to share the cost of the server or the responsibilities of administrating it, maybe you want to collectively learn how to run all this stuff, or maybe you want to start meetings to exchange tips, etc. However, this does not mean that you need to cut yourself off from the rest of the world and this form of localism should not be misunderstood for a hipsterist and reactionary form of escapism. Instead, such an approach is quite the opposite as it provides a possibility to actively engage with societal issues. It allows groups to collectively think, in the sense of defining questions and hypotheses themselves, acquire skills and knowledge and respond to issues that are both relevant to their own situation but that can also resonate globally, enabling others to start a similar process.

The goal of this article was to provide some tools and insights which not only allow for contextualisation of the technology we are using and supporting, but also help making sure that the instant-messaging you and your friends use happens in a trusted and secure environment, as much as possible outside the economies of surveillance. For this reason our motivation for writing this article was two-fold. On the one hand we wanted to show that the issue of privacy is more insidious than institutional eavesdropping and not merely solved with the use of end-to-end encryption. On the other hand, and as a consequence, we wanted to suggest not a different app, but a different approach altogether on the basis of XMPP federation and collective action. Therefore we’ve written two guides. One on how to configure a server and one on how to choose and use clients that can go along with it. These allow you to put a self-hosted approach, an approach that brings aspects of trust, scale and implementation to the forefront and into practice. Once again, such guides should not be perceived as definitive answers but more as tools to keep us, and hopefully you too, busy formulating the right questions and building networks of mutual help. So while we are unable to recommend you the next big app that will solve all user surveillance and financialisation once and for all—as we are pretty sure no such app will ever even exist—we hope to at least help shed a light on the confused and confusing discourses that surround crypto-sound alternatives which may obfuscate less obvious problems.