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Intro­duction Update: I wrote a follow up: Keeping platforms open . Check it out if you found this article interesting. I have never used WhatsApp, and never will. Despite this, I still feel the need to write an article about WhatsApp since it’s the perfect case study to help understand a class of businesses models I call “user domestication”. The domestication of users is high on my list of problems plaguing the human race, and is worth a detailed explanation. WhatsApp wasn’t the first instant messenger of its kind, and probably won’t be the last. I simply chose to focus on WhatsApp since its recent privacy issues have made it a hot topic. With the meta-explanation out of the way, let us begin. WhatsApp’s rise For those unfamiliar, WhatsApp is a tool that makes it convenient and easy to help Facebook further its core mission: the optimization and auctioning of human behavior (colloquially known as “targeted advertising”). It originally persuaded people to consent to this by allowing them to send text to each other over the Internet, something that was already possible , and combining an easy-to-learn UI with successful marketing. It then expanded to include features such as free voice and video calls. Free calls helped it grow to become the de-facto communication platform in many regions. I’m stunned at its ubiquity every time I visit my extended family in India; I’m frequently greeted by looks of confusion when I remind them that I don’t use WhatsApp. Having its own proprietary chat system incompatible with other clients allowed WhatsApp to build a network effect : WhatsApp’s existing users were held captive by the fact that leaving WhatsApp meant losing the ability to communicate with WhatsApp users. People switching from WhatsApp must convince all their friends to switch, too; this includes less technically inclined friends who had a hard time learning WhatsApp in the first place. In a WhatsApp world, people who want to keep in touch must abide by the following rules: Everyone can only use the proprietary WhatsApp client to send messages; developing alternative clients isn’t supported. Everyone’s mobile device must run an operating system supported by said client. Since WhatsApp developers will only write a client for popular operating systems, the Android and iOS duopoly strengthens. Users fully depend on WhatsApp developers. If WhatsApp developers decide to include user-hostile features in the app, users must go with it. They can’t switch to a different server or client without switching away from WhatsApp and losing the ability to communicate with all their WhatsApp contacts. User domestication WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters. Over time, this made it difficult or impossible to return to their previous lifestyle. That process should sound familiar: it’s eerily similar to the domestication of animals. I call this type of vendor lock-in user domestication : the removal of user autonomy to trap users into serving vendors. I chose this metaphor because animal domestication is a gradual process that isn’t always deliberate, and typically revolves around one group becoming dependent upon another. For example: there’s evidence that domestication of dogs began with socialization, resulting in not-entirely-artificial selection promoting genes that resulted in more friendliness with and dependence upon humans. note 1 Whether it happens on purpose or by accident, user domestication almost always follows the same three steps: A high level of dependence given from users to a software vendor An inability for users to control their software, through at least one of the following methods: Preventing modification of the software Preventing migration onto a different platform The exploitation of now-captive users who are unable to resist The completion of the first two steps left WhatsApp users vulnerable to user domestication. With investors to answer to, they had every incentive to implement user-hostile features without consequence. So, of course, they did. WhatsApp’s descent Domestication has a purpose: it enables a master species to exploit the domesticated species for its own gain. Recently, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to allow sharing data with its parent, Facebook. Users who agreed to use WhatsApp under its previous privacy policy had two options: agree to the new policy or be unable to use WhatsApp again. The WhatsApp privacy policy update is a classic bait-and-switch: WhatsApp lured users in with a sleek interface and the impression of privacy, domesticated them to remove their autonomy to migrate, and then backtracked on its previous commitment to privacy with minimal consequence. Each step in this process enabled the next; had user domestication not taken place, it would be easy for most users to switch away with minimal friction. Those of us who were sounding the alarm a few years ago experienced a brief moment of sadistic bliss when our titles were upgraded from “annoying and paranoid conspiracy theorists” to just “annoying”. An attempt at damage control The bait-and-switch operation incurred backlash significant enough for a noticeable minority of users to actually migrate; this number turned out to be slightly more than the rounding error WhatsApp was likely expecting. In response, WhatsApp delayed the change and published an ad to improve its image. Whatsapp Ad Toggle image transcript Image transcript WhatsApp Protects and Secures Your Personal Messages. WhatsApp cannot see your personal messages or hear your calls and neither can Facebook. WhatsApp does not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling. WhatsApp cannot see your shared location and neither can Facebook. WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook. WhatsApp groups remain private. You can set your messages to disappear. You can download your data. The ad lists various data that WhatsApp doesn’t collect or share. Allaying data collection concerns by listing data not collected is misleading. WhatsApp doesn’t collect hair samples or retinal scans either; not collecting that information doesn’t mean it respects privacy because it doesn’t change the information WhatsApp does collect. The ad denies “keep[ing] logs of who everyone is messaging or calling”. Collecting data is not the same as “keeping logs”; it’s possible for metadata to be fed into an algorithm before being discarded. A model can thus learn that two users call each other frequently without keeping logs of the metadata for each call. The fact that they specifically chose to phrase this line around logging implies that WhatsApp either already collects this class of data or has deliberately left the door open to collecting it in the future. A stroll through WhatsApp’s actual privacy policy at the time reveals that they do collect considerable metadata used for marketing through Facebook. Software freedom With user domestication, providing useful software to users is a means to the end of exploiting them. The alternative is simple: make serving users the end in and of itself. To avoid being controlled by software, users must be in control. Software that allows users to be in control is called free software or libre software. The word “free” in this context refers to freedom rather than price. Software freedom is similar to the concept of open-source; the latter is an offshoot of the former focused on more business-friendly practical benefits rather than ethics. A less ambiguous term that neutrally refers to free, libre, and open-source software is FLOSS . note 2 Others have explained the fundamental concepts underpinning free software and its importance better than I can, so I won’t go into detail. It comes down to four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others Making money with FLOSS The most common objection I hear is that FLOSS makes it harder to make money. The key to making money with FLOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind. Managed hosting isn’t a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn’t offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting. FLOSS isn’t always enough Free software is a necessary but sometimes insufficient requirement to build domestication immunity. Two more measures include simplicity and open platforms. Simplicity When software grows too complex, it needs to be maintained by a large team. Users who disagree with a vendor can’t easily fork and maintain a multi-million-line codebase, especially if the software in question potentially contains security vulnerabilities. Dependence on the vendor can grow quite problematic when complexity causes development costs to skyrocket; the vendor might resort to implementing user-hostile features to stay afloat. Complex software that can’t be developed by a different group of people creates dependence, step one of user domestication. That alone is enough to open the door to problematic developments. Case study: Mozilla and the Web Mozilla was a ray of hope in the browser wars, a space dominated by adtech, surveillance, and vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, developing a browser engine is a monumental task difficult enough for Opera and Microsoft to give up and re-skin Chromium. Browsers are more than the document readers they were meant to be: they’ve evolved into application runtimes with their own stacks for GPU acceleration, Bluetooth, permissions, device enumeration, bundled media codecs, DRM note 3 , extension APIs, developer tools…the list goes on. It takes billions of dollars a year to respond to vulnerabilities in such a massive attack surface and keep up with a standard that grows at such a worrying rate. Those billions have to come from somewhere. Mozilla ended up having to make major compromises to stay afloat. It cut search deals with blatantly user-hostile companies, and bundled the browser with ads and bloatware such as a partially ad-funded proprietary bookmarking SaaS called Pocket . Since acquiring Pocket (to diversify its sources of income), Mozilla hasn’t yet delivered on its earlier statements saying it would op...