Technology had advanced at a mind boggling pace, more so since the introduction of mobiles, and it’s inclusion into our lifestyle has invariably opened up our homes to the world. Top tech firms are known to “mine” user data in as simple form as a cookie. This data is later used for financial gains to ultimately please their shareholders. This, though anticipated, is not excusable. There is an ongoing war against privacy invasion via digital media.
Mindless to all the protests, tech firms keep on introducing such privacy invading features in their applications/websites. One such latest update is the double blue tick in whatsapp chat.
Some might argue what’s the big fuss about. So lets see how it functions.
When you send a message to your contact on whatsapp, once it is delivered to the whatsapp server a small tick appear on the bottom right corner of the chat message. Once your contact receives it on his/her phone, another tick is added and now you have a double tick, signifying that the message has been delivered to your contact. In past, you had no way of telling whether your friend has read the message. This was ok since the transmission of message was more important.
But introduce a double tick which signifies that your friend had read the message and the scenario changes. You expect a reply. Your friend has chosen not to reply at that moment. You start the seemingly never ending wait for the reply, while your friend is busy with something important and chooses to finish this conversation later. Meanwhile, you come up with all the possible reasons, including neglect on the part of your friend, while the time starts weighing on your mind. Meanwhile your friend is busy in an important business meeting and doesn’t realise all this. But does he need to realise?
Repeat this scenario and one day you start feeling that your friend is not longer your friend.
Whats the need of this feature. Why should anyone know whether I have read his message or not. I can take my own sweet time to reply. But, Whatsapp, through this tiny feature, is forcing me to either reply to all the messages that I read, or quit whatsapp alltogether. I checked the settings but couldn’t find any that could disable this feature.
Now don’t say that I should get lost from whatsapp. The company itself wouldn’t say that publically fearing drastic reduction in its valuation.
Wakeup whatsapp. Give us our privacy.