Comment by kwar13
21 hours ago
You don't think WhatsApp for some reason stopping to work and airlines losing their default way to issue tickets is a national security issue? How about health care appointments with national ID and address on them being sent as PDFs and stored on Meta's servers? All of those are massive national security issues for me. It can grind the country to a halt for days on end.
There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
South Korea is not a great example here. It's been weeks since the big data center fire and they've barely started to recover. Storing all data internally can really backfire if best practices aren't being followed, and that's a lot more likely with a not-invented-here approach.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20251009/rec...
Why are they running everything through WhatsApp in the first place with no alternatives? Using WhatsApp as a convenience is fine, but if you’re doing it with no way to not use WhatsApp or obtain data through an alternate mechanism other than WhatsApp, that’s what is causing your problems.
Issues that threaten national security are issues that threaten a nation’s sovereignty, put it at risk of war, or compromise the security of high ranking politicians, members of a nation’s intelligence service, military assets, and other issues of that caliber. The potential to miss flights or health care appointments does not rise to that level, but if it’s an actual problem, then it’s something solvable without reaching for the anti-monopoly gun or national security gun and a good start would be governments not using WhatsApp as an exclusive mechanism for obtaining government services. The second step is governments mandating that businesses in healthcare or transportation and other such critical industries have alternative mechanisms for customers to reach them other than WhatsApp.