Affordance is power: contradictions between communicational and technical dimensions of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption
The present study analyses critically the roll-out of the end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, supported by Affordances Theory, guided by the “platform biography” framework that points to a historical perspective of the App. After pointing out the contradictions with evidences from the empirical work,...
| Autores: | , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | Brasil |
| Recursos: | Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) |
| Repositorio: | Revista Animus (Santa Maria. Online) |
| Idioma: | portugués |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/36841 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://periodicos.ufsm.br/animus/article/view/36841 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Encryption Affordances Encriptación Criptografia |
| Resumo: | The present study analyses critically the roll-out of the end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, supported by Affordances Theory, guided by the “platform biography” framework that points to a historical perspective of the App. After pointing out the contradictions with evidences from the empirical work, we conclude that the implementation of such affordance should be interpreted as a strategic move inscribed in: (i) a guerrilla Public Relations war between WhatsApp Inc. against national states in which is revealed (ii) a power move by the digital media corporation to avoid political conflicts with them and that (iii) a cost-benefit approach leads to the prevalence of commercial massiveness at the expense of technological utopia. |
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