WhatsApp Beaten by Apple’s New iMessage Privacy Update
The image halfway down the article showing the privacy “nutritional label” comparison from Signal to iMessage to WhatsApp to Facebook is such a beautiful case study in UI design.<p>Everything in the label is “bad”. The best label is an empty label. It gives you the instant scale of the kinds of data being collected without any noise or wasted characters, and then if you want to actually look closer and see what’s going on the detailed breakdown of all the different types of tracking is striking.<p>No legalese. No filler. No double-speak about how it’s improving the product. Just here’s what’s tracked. Perhaps inspired by how the FDA does “black box warnings” when there is crucial information they need to relate about possible dangers of a drug.<p>Now, gushing praise aside, making sure the labels are truly accurate is the hard part. For example, I’m not sure how iMessage can claim it doesn’t track payments when I use it to actually make payments, but I guess the point is aside from the system that actually processed the payment that iMessage itself is not using any metadata of that payment. Very interesting distinction which boils down to whether a bullet item might show up in the box or not.