Technology

You gatta be real stupid to not realize that Facebook is harvesting your data.

Only a tech illiterate can expect privacy from a closed source program, open source is a requirement for both privacy and security.

No surprised at all tbf.

Well if I can't trust Meta with my information, who CAN I trust

15 years ago I’d have called this a conspiracy theory given how the evidence seems to be anecdotal, but given literally every single other thing we’ve learned in recent times about how cartoonishly evil and lying the tech bros truly are, it seems entirely likely.

Wait, you are telling me that the company whos entire business is collecting personal information, including people who don't sign up for their services, to leverage for advertising, is keeping their platforms unsecured they can continually grab more information rather than secure it?

I for one am shocked, absolutely shocked.

Im not a big fan of meta and WhatsApp, but these claims are a bit much. Any employee gets access to messages through a well documented internal process? "No separate decryption step is required" , so the WhatsApp CLIENT is not doing any actual e2e encryption and no attempt at reverse engineering or traffic analysis has ever seen that this is the case?

Where can one see, what these whistleblowers have actually published? I would expect to see this "simple process" and how that interface actually works... And I would expect any journalist to request some proof (show me the last message i sent to Alice) before trusting an anonymous whistleblower making such an extraordinary claim.

From what I heard so far, that anonymous whistleblower could be a troll or an ex-employee who just wants to cause some trouble for meta.

We should not trust anything blindly, even if it fits with our view of the world. Meta is an evil company, but as long as there is no indication for these specific allegations to be true, we should treat them as unfounded allegations.

DUH

Proposed line of defense: "With all respect, M. Judge, with all the different times we fucked our users, lied to them, tricked them, experimented on them, ignored them, we already sold private discussions on Facebook in the past, our CEO and founder most famous quote is «They trust me, dumbfucks!», the list goes on and on: no one in their sane mind would genuinely believe we were not spying on Whatsapp! They try to play dumb, they could not possibly believe we were being fair and honest THIS time?!"

It is end to end encrypted but they can just pull the decrypted message from the app. This has been assumed for years, since they said they could parse messages for advertising purposes.

The biggest news is that Slashdot is still alive.

Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.

E2EE isn't really relevant, when the "ends" have the functionality, to share data with Meta directly: as "reports", "customer support", "assistance" (Meta AI); where a UI element is the separation.

Edit: it turns out cloud backups aren't E2E encrypted by default... meaning: any backup data, which passes through Meta's servers, to the cloud providers (like iCloud or Google Account), is unobscured to Meta; unless E2EE is explicitly enabled. And even then, WhatsApp's privacy policy states: "if you use a data backup service integrated with our Services (like iCloud or Google Account), they will receive information you share with them, such as your WhatsApp messages." So the encryption happens on the server side, meaning: Apple and Google still have full access to the content. It doesn't matter if you, personally, refuse to use the "feature": if the other end does, your interactions will be included in their backups.

If I am not adding my own private key to the app, like in Tox, I don't trust their encryption.