This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Call me old fashioned but I really think that for real E2EE the vendor of the encryption and the vendor of the infrastructure should be two different entities.
For example PGP/GPG on … great! Proton? Not great
Jabber/XMMP with e2ee encryption great! WhatsApp/Telegram/signal… less so (sure I take signal over the other two every day… but it’s enough to compromise a single entity for accessing the data)
Okay Old Fashioned, but doesn't open source encryption audited by a third party solve this problem? Signal protocol for example? Also proton, I'm guessing, but I'm too lazy to check
Unfortunately even the best intentioned and best audited project can be compromised. So that is not a guarantee (sure, much better than closed source but that is a given)
You may be forced by a rubber hose attack (or legal one) to insert vulnerabilities in your code… and you have the traffic… a single point to attack… signal/proton/etc
Is it possible with two different vendors? Sure it is but it is way more complicated
That's a really good point. All we'd need is for signal devs to be compromised in some way and the next update ends security for signal.
Cynical me would say they don't have to use the code they put up on GitHub in production.
insert pikachushockedface
A lot of victim blaming in this thread. Why can't you just be mad for someone who was deceived?
It would not be surprising if found to be true. Difficult to see how the current business model operates at a profit. Their long term goal is the usual loss leader model until a monopoly is achieved and then slug us with ads, sell all the data, hike the price, etc. Sickening to watch them cosy up to fascists. They are probably supplying any and all the agencies with intelligence scraped from their user base. If Facebook were a person they would be a psychopath.
Obligatory
If Facebook were a person they would be a psychopath.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg kind of is Facebook, and he's a psycho.
Well if I can't trust Meta with my information, who CAN I trust
Me
Oh okay. My location is 55.752121, 37.617664, my full name is Jeremy, and my password is hunter9. I trust you not to tell this to anybody
What?!! No. The owner of WhatsApp would never lie to us.
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.
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.
DUH
No if this is proven it would be a real scandal and would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
If it's false that's good too, since then WA has e2e encryption
would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
Most users of whatsapp don't care about e2e. They hardly even know what it is.
You gatta be real stupid to not realize that Facebook is harvesting your data.
No surprised at all tbf.
I would argue that the vast majority of users don't use WhatsApp for privacy. In the UK at least, it's just the app everyone has and it works. I've actively tried to move friends over to signal, to limited success, but honestly it can be escaped how encryption is not it's killer IP.
Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.
Only a tech illiterate can expect privacy from a closed source program, open source is a requirement for both privacy and security.
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.
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?!"
