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
Spam their public corporate accounts with complaints, in public comments. That’s the only way.
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.
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
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.
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
fuck fb - also kinda waited to the last minute to find a new place, no? hope things works out for you
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.
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.
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
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
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 😐
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)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it’s more than one person they may use Whatsapp for business with a direct channel without a phone.
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.
no remorse for people still using wa
it’s just a shame that a majority of the world uses it for communicatiom. My family switched to Signal a few years ago, but had to switch back to WA because we had to talk to the relatives who were still on WA. too many of them to convince to switch to Signal, and unlikely to work even if we tried. similar to OP, not all are tech savvy but can use WA. I tried getting my family to go back to signal, but no dice. eventually I gave up. I’ve heard that Europe is looking to switch away from Meta products, at least that is happening though.
I badgered mine repeatedly for years and now basically everyone I know is on it.
Guess OP should just go homeless lol
Imagine reading the post before leaving a judgemental comment
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
Are you copy-pasting the same message across many chats? If so, try varying them a little.
Infuriating, I know.Meta is changing how they price messages sent on the WhatsApp Business API (they’ll start charging for every single message now) and lately they’ve gone haywire trying to ban unofficial WhatsApp Automation APIs.
If you try to use their crap even a little faster than the average Joe, you get caught in the crossfire.If you send the same message across a couple contacts it’s already enough to flag you.
And if you’re using WhatsApp Web it’s even worse.
And now that your account already got restricted once, it’s likely to keep getting worse unless you can afford to not use WhatsApp for like, a week for your number to “cool down”I too wish my country’s communications wasn’t so Intertwined with this garbage.
I was looking at visiting Costa Rica for a bit, read that even restaurants were using WA for orders. I couldn’t imagine relaying on Facebook’s company policy for my business
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.
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.
What country are u in that u have to go through whatsapp? Have only ever used my personal cell for stuff like this, if I have to download an app to do something you can bet I ain’t doing it lol. If there’s anything I have learned its that if it needs an app, it doesn’t fucking work.
Could be germany. WhatsApp is very widely used here, because back then in the olden days SMS flat rate was expensive. And WhatsApp was ideal, because it worked even on throttled data rates, so you could use it even if you ran out of data. So making it basically a free alternative to SMS.
Interesting! I didn’t even have a phone with data until after the unlimited minutes and texts were standard on most plans lol.
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.
