not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).
I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).
Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.
> My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat
That's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest.
The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.
I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:
He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything. (and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)
My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl???
Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
Whatsapp "claims" to be e2e, but nobody knows for sure since its sources are closed.
Still more secure than non encrypted email yet a lot of people still use email to send fairly sensitive data.
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
Some European governments are effectively run via WhatsApp.
maybe China is right: one app to rule them all
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.