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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Facebook owns what’s app and they can read any message on the service, they’ve also been known to give logs and messages to law enforcement agencies at request without warrants.
Why is it legal for them to advertise it as end-to-end encrypted then? I thought the main danger lies in WhatsApp insistence on backing up non-encrypted history to Google Drive/iCloud.
Of course, the existence of backdoors is usually not disclosed (duh), but can they actually read any message?
Because they are a multi-billion dollar company.
You can have end to end encryption over the wire and still have all of your shit harvested at the “endpoints”
It really sucks how a shit ton of money gives a company the ability to do anything they want and avoid legal consequences almost all of the time. It's a corrupt society we live in.
EU usually frowns upon that though. Sure, the fines are so small that it’s negligible for Meta, but there should be some fines. But all I find via quick googling are this year’s sanctions over personal data processing in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. The nature of these data is not clear though.
I am not trying to say that WhatsApp is safe to use, mind you. I am pretty sure they will hand over all the info along with encryption keys at first government’s request (or any other highest bidder for that matter), but that’s only my perception of them as a company, with no hard proof at hand.
The EU has been trying to outlaw encryption for most of this year.
"The EU" isn't one singular person or party or state or whatever. There are some people who are trying to outlaw it but that doesn't mean that they're the majority or that it's even legal to do.
It’s not illegal because it is end to end encrypted when you send messages, but it’s not encrypted on your phone and they have access to that, not to mention, I imagine they have access to the keys used to encrypt the messages, so even if they backed it up encrypted they can still read the messages.
The point of implementing it is not to protect people from surveillance, but rather to make people think they’re protected so they’ll keep using the platform rather than moving to another service. Their actual claims about it amount to “If your on public Wi-Fi or something, people skimming that won’t be able to see your messages” which is absurd because they already couldn’t.
Admittedly, no law enforcement that they refuse to cooperate with will have access to the messages, but like, “law enforcement groups Facebook doesn’t cooperate with” is a very small list.
I believe this is down to what they define as being end to end encrypted.
It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.
Within WhatsApp’s privacy policy, it’s important to note that they only mention end to end encryption when it comes to your messages. Everything else is apparently “fair game” for collection. Of note, the Usage and Log information point details all the metadata they collect on you automatically, including how you use the service; how long you use the service; your profile info; the groups you’re in; whether you’re online; and the last time you were online, to name a few things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that technically they are end to end encrypted by definition, and whilst they’ve gone ahead and implemented things such as encrypted backups (that you must enable) to make it harder for them to read your message contents, they can still collect a lot of metadata on every user.
There is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol: yowsup
I’ve not seen this before. This is really neat! Thanks for sharing ❤️
And the metadata is enough to get convictions. A person was convicted back in 2019 or so based on the metadata of her whatsapp conversation with a reporter. Natalie something, I think.
It wouldn’t surprise me if WhatsApp’s model on this is what the UK government were thinking of with the Online Safety Bill when they tried to enforce a back door in encrypted messengers.
It’s incredible just how much more interesting metadata can be than the actual message contents.
Explaining this to people when they ask why I don’t use WhatsApp is pretty difficult though.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I found out that what I thought was just a casual walk down the street mindlessly chatting with a friend turned out to also involve a third party neither of us were aware of tracking all of our movements.
It's very obvious to me that GBoard sends data directly to Google circumventing all encryption.
👆👆👆👆👆👆 Came looking for this one. Because somehow Joe Average ends up with keyboards having "added value" like Giphy (from Meta) integration and online spell checkers because local dictionaries are to oldskool.
This is just completely wrong. If you read past the misleading headline here:
https://nypost.com/2021/09/07/facebook-reads-and-shares-whatsapp-private-messages-report/
You'll see that Facebook cannot, in fact, give logs to law enforcement. If you choose to report a message you've received and send it to Facebook, then obviously then they can read it.
Also, your claim in another comment that Facebook does not have private keys to decrypt your encrypted messages is just fantasy.
According to the declassified internal FBI document I just linked, they do have access to the content of messages from what’s app, without any formal legal request.
The NY post is a poor source and completely unreliable.
don't see any such link
There's no such link in their comment history either.
I feel like this needs some sort of citation for it. I know some suspect the claims about E2EE are bogus but I haven't seen actual proof about it.
I mean, they definitely use end to end encryption. The problem is that they’ve done nothing would convince people they’re not harvesting the content of the messages in the app before it’s encrypted and sent. And there is a long history of them handing over decrypted information to law enforcement upon request, without warrant.
I assumed it was a more solid case than just that it's technically possible. I was hoping for cases where we know they've done it.
Does that include message content though? That's sorta the crux of what we're talking about. Metadata for sure, but whether we know that they can read our message content, that's afaik still unclear.
Yes, what’s app messaging specifically has a long history under Facebook of giving away user data like candy to anyone who wants it, including the content of private messages. It’s been shown repeatedly and is common knowledge yet they still have yet to do anything to prevent it. this here is a declassified internal document from the FBI highlighting what they have access to and what level of legal request they need for what. Notably message content requires no legal request to access
I think that photo goes against the claim that WhatsApp can decrypt or otherwise easily get access to message content
Also was that before the full encryption of the backups? Someone else posted a study about their backup encryption where they concluded that it at least seemed secure (with the caveat of it being a proprietary app).
It's not enough to have it be E2E-encrypted; E2E means nothing if the decryption keys are not stored locally.
And aren't they?
They are not.
As far as I know the private keys are kept on the device and the app generates them. That's how Signal protocol works afaik. Do you have something to show that it's not the case for WhatsApp since stuff I searched for seemed to claim that's the case.
So, I looked it up and according to the official Whatsapp FAQ, the keys are indeed stored locally.
Still, considering WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, I wouldn't trust them. Their whole business model has always been about harvesting as much data as they can. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a total lie.
For sure they're not trustworthy and can't really verify either since it's proprietary app. But I mean more that unless they've specifically made some changes, the keys are stored locally. And afaik we don't really know of cases proving that they are lying about that.
Fair enough, I guess. Still, in my honest opinion, it's not worth it. They've already long since betrayed my trust, so they could say the sky is blue and I still wouldn't trust them. Lol.