Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

Does web-to-app tracking through localhost on Android that is illegal under GDPR count?

Also people found out and nothing happened?

So literally no downside to putting a backdoor and lying about it

Even after we found out, nobody cared...

Because the entire rest of society has wrapped itself around Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram. It is easy to be a free software purist until you need to know if your child's school has a snow day. Websites and mailing lists are dead. I cannot be involved in my child's school or any of the informal social networks around the parents and teachers without using Meta's platforms. I cannot volunteer at a non-profit I care deeply about without using Meta's platforms, because that's what they have to coordinate.

Are you going to suggest to me that I should force them onto Signal and a pile of other DIY platforms? I dare you. Look a burned out parent in their bloodshot eyes first.

Because super vast majority of the population doesn't care. You can just look at the leaks from the last decade and its outcomes. Every company that deals with socials also know that people only care about their privacy within their own small circle. As in, they only care about privacy within their own small bubbles.

Imagine a small local non-profit with 5000 likes on their page. They might be trying their darnedest to improve their newsletter numbers, but they still need to be on Facebook.

Imagine that times a billion.

Easily.

The alternatives are also probably up to the same sketchy shit, so your choices are to be a hermit, or accept that your services will spy on you.

If you want to participate in society, you have to either trust a very large list of untrustworthy people... Or acknowledge that they are untrustworthy, and mitigate accordingly. Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.

Signal lagged so far in polish and features that getting friends and family to use it was doa. So I can choose to communicate with friends and family on the apps they use, or I make it very difficult for them to communicate with me.

That ends with them mostly not communicating with me, not with them switching apps.

Does the WhatsApp program generate and store/mange the private keys? If so, it would be possible for the program to send private keys on request, effectively backdooring the endpoint. Such an arrangement would allow Meta to put its hand on it heart and truthfully say it is end-to-end encrypted (on the network), whilst still providing a way around it.

> > Zuck dribbled and 3D Chessed the Law

> Mixed metaphors aside

Zapp hit that bullseye, causing the rest of the dominoes to fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

I’m another Iranian but I’m not actively living in Iran.

I agree with others here that regime really needs to go but I of course share your fear of what could happen to Iran once the central government is weakened. Currently there are multiple tiers of special forces keeepinf various groups in check, however once this is gone, things could get ugly.

I worry about my family living there, we have been having a hard time time reaching there since the attacks started and there is no way of telling what is going to happen next.

What’s the alternative? Live under the delusional islamic theocratic dictatorship forever? If you think the islamic republic can be replaced through peaceful protests you have another thing coming, they have already killed thousands of protestors and they have no problem killing because they actually believe they are doing god’s work and the protestors are infidels that deserve to die.

I take my chances for a probable dysfunctional government rather than a definitely dysfunctional one.

I would expect that the end of the current Iranian regime brings about a heavily military-influenced fake democracy that structurally resembles the current government of Pakistan.

The clerics are a paper tiger. Their domestic support base has been almost fully eroded. The Islamic Revolution had proclaimed the hijab as a cause célèbre; today, Iranians generally ignore it when the government isn't looking, after decades of protest and suppression.

But the Iranian military controls a vast amount of the country's economy (by comparison to normal countries) and retains popular support as an opponent of the West. It won't go quietly, and Israel lacks the resources and the United States lacks the will to dismantle it, which anyway would be a Herculean undertaking and cost millions of innocent lives. Military dictatorships are usually pragmatic on social issues, economically protectionist, and politically repressive — making the hypothetical new Iran look more like China's ideal ally than America's.

The most likely vector of regime change is a military coup that produces a government which sues for peace. They may agree to dismantle the nuclear program, but there will be a sense of "for now", and they will cultivate alliances with an eye to protection from the West. We may then see real nuclear weapons in Iran, but with red flags and yellow stars on them, instead of the imaginary nuclear weapons that were invented to keep Bibi out of prison.

That's sadly the goal

the diaspora seems to overwhelmingly do so, at least.

> have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program

The US Director of National Intelligence testified to congress a few weeks ago that no US intelligence agency believes that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and that they believed Iran was at least 3 years away from having the ability to build a nuclear bomb even if they tried.

What you are saying directly contradicts what US intelligence agencies have said.

A couple sources: https://jewishinsider.com/2025/03/gabbard-iran-is-not-curren... https://www.newsweek.com/tulsi-gabbard-iran-nuclear-weapon-2...

We dont care about Iran having a nuke any more than we care about Pakistan's or N. Korea.

N. Korea has said mean things to us too.

The only thing we care about is Iran's resources and support for the Palestinians.

> the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history

This is a good read: https://www.mypersiancorner.com/death-to-america-explained-o...

The phrase is ugly, but it's how you say "fuck the US government" in a very melodramatic and poetic language where the most common way of calling your friend's baby cute translates to "let me martyr myself for this child."

The USA created the current Iranian regime by installing a puppet and then getting butt hurt when their puppet was ousted. A real freedom for us tyranny for you situation.

Then the USA created the Saddam regime in Iraq to fight the Iranian regime and that went great.

And now the USA is supporting Israel to terrorize the Middle East in their name and with their bombs and that’s going swimmingly too. Top job everyone.

I don't pretend this is an argument at all in towards the situation in Iran, so don't quote me as justifying action or inaction there in regards to this, but it is interesting to take note North Korea actually has dozens of real nuclear weapons and the death to America rhetoric and all we seem to do is laugh at them. Of course NK has no real ability to blow up the US, but they could likely nuke or at least obliterate a sizeable piece of ally South Korea no problem.

My only quibble with what you said is that this war was started by Iran on 10/7/23. Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc - these were all part of the self proclaimed "Axis of Resistance".

People may disagree on the ethics of who is the "right" side, if the war was fought "fairly" and according to the "ethics of war", but you would have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to believe that Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis were not Iranian proxies armed and funded by Iran and acted independently from Iran's goals.

As a corollary, I do not buy into the idea that this Israel/Iran war was/is being fought (only) because of the nuclear issue. It is being fought because it is the last (hopefully) part of the larger war of Israel vs Axis of Resistance, which can only be resolved through the defeat of either Israel or Iran.

If Israel is defeated, the Muslim world can then go on to fight their Shia vs Sunni war, if Iran is defeated, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran in Iraq, and Houthis will basically go away and those nations/territories will need to determine their future, both internally and their relationships with Israel and the Muslim world.

You think all of that is unjustified? You think USA and Israel are just innocent babies? Israel’s been antagonizing its neighbors since its foundation and committing a genocide since 2023 and USA has destabilized the entire region. What was the Iraq war? WMD’s? Did they find any? Iran’s nuclear ambitions are the same thing as Iraq’s supposed WMD’s. Just more manufactured consent BS.

Iran has a right to defend itself.

On the one hand you have a country which has nuclear weapons with a regional ally that doesn’t want to say whether it has nuclear weapons or not that has in real life couped the other country’s government. On the other hand you have the country which Israel lies about getting nuclear weapons (et tu?) very soon and that says mean things about Israel and the West. Conclusion: there is “certainly” no blame for responding (invading) that other country.

Thank you for the opportunity to engage in healthy criticism of rogue states.

I bet. The middle east is more complicated than quantum mechanics. There are like gazillions of factions, local and foreign. You would think you can roughly group them into Israel+US, Russia, Shia, Sunni. They surely all hate each other. But there are still constantly shifting alliances. At some point Iran (Shia?) was funding ISIS (Sunni?) only to later team up with the US and Israel to fight them. Sometimes all these islamist groups have a dude who looks like the leader but it's actually the guy two levels down who is the real puppet master. And everybody is known under at least three different names all of which are Al-something. I tried to read a book on this but you become this manic investigation board meme guy.

> nations near Israel to be successful,

I'm guessing that doesn't include Turkey or the rich oil arab states.

> known for funding and training militant and terrier groups globally

So does the US.

> They also call for the annihilation of the Big Satan (USA) and the Small Satan (Israel)

You are literally calling for the annihilation of their state here.

> All the while running for The Bomb.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war.

There is definitely a cold war going on between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure if it escalating to a hot war would be better. The 20th century Cold War had all the same things you mentioned, with both sides fighting proxy wars, calling for the annihilation of the other side, and had atomic weapons. And I think everyone agrees that the end of the cold war that we had was definitely better than nuclear Armageddon.

And I don't know if the 20th would have been better if only the US had atomic weapons. MAD might have saved millions of lives in both sides.

Oh no! Mean words!

Anyway we have plenty of people here that hate the US and are far more likely to actually create a problem.

Furthermore I'd argue the deficit spending (a very large portion of which is defense) is a much more serious existential threat.

What if we instead we were just responsible for killing all of their kids, would that work? I could see that working in the US just randomly kill a bunch of peoples kids and that would calm everything down.

You've got to be kidding me. The US actively supports and runs interference for the biggest terror state in the Middle East right now. We are also buddy buddy with another country in the Middle East that dismembered one of our journalists and provided most of the 9/11 high jackers.

^ This

There will be no nation building component. Israeli leadership has no interest, nor does American leadership. And the Gulf States, Turkiye, Russia and China lack the capacity and/or manpower.

Sadly, I feel Iran will most likely teeter into a Libya or Myanmar style Civil War with the Army, IRGC, Basij, and local police at each others throats in the heartland, and ancillary regions like Iranian Azerbaijan, Iranian Kurdistan, Khuzestan+Ilam, and significant portions of Balochistan and Khorasan becoming de facto autonomous and meddled in by regional powers.

Governments do fall to internal revolt/collapse regularly. I mean, Iran has done so within the memory of most of its senior leadership! They understand this much better than I do- Khamenei himself played a major role in toppling the Shah. Just generally that doesn't happen while being attacked by other countries air-power, which as a general rule makes populations support their governments rather than start marching in the streets against them.

Thanks to historians, we can understand things like the collapse of the USSR better (my favorite English language book- I am sadly monolingual- would be Plokhy's _The Last Empire_) and see the personal and impersonal forces that ended up tearing the country apart, and doubtless some of those are present in Iran right now. But I personally would not bet on these strikes helping to topple the existing government.

Not true.

Chinese planes with transponders being turned off are landing in Iran with unknown Cargo on board. (Reported across the news). Iran is supplying Russia with Drones for Ukraine so strategic partner.

Russia recently lost Syria as an ally with the change in government, they will not want to lose Iran to the USA too.

If the West can back Ukraine to the level they have done, then no different for Iran's friends to do the same.

When every country lining up to buy US debt they can print as much money as they wish. Lately however that buying of the US debt does not seem as attractive as it used to be.

Can you cite the specific instance of Meta (or whoever) receiving pressure that led to an extrajudicial arrest (or whatever)? Or at least the specifics of the sharing that would enable it? Because if you're not talking about specifics your point is "abstract" by definition.

Repression in Iran is real, not abstract. It happens, the state wants to monitor internet use to enable it, and the linked article is very specific about them wanting to disallow Meta's product.

There was no "Palestinian territory" in the 1967 map. Gaza was part of Egypt, the West Bank was part of Jordan.

But neither Egypt nor Jordan want anything to do with them now because of the internal instability it would inevitably result in.

at 1967 west bank was annexed by jordan and all Palestinians had jordanian citizenship and Gaza strip was part of Egypt, surrounded by barbered wire with military issued permits to enter or exit it.

this is what 1967 borders are. feel free to check maps, wiki, etc. There are no palestinian territory on map at 1967 borders