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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

> https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/26000016

That "Option 1" optout is the darkest dark pattern I've ever seen. A secret hidden checkbox that only shows up if you tap "yes, I'd like read 2000 words of legal jargon", which doesn't do anything anyway, because either way Facebook is getting your phone number. They just might choose not to use it for ad targeting if you check the box.

Gross, gross, gross.

Also, has anyone else noticed "to fight spam and abuse" is the "think of the children" of Internet services? Any invasive technique (SMS verification, browser fingerprinting, trying to sniff out unique hardware hashes, DRM) is always presented as "fighting spammers". Just an interesting sidebar.

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You're seeing this everywhere because spam and abuse make everything suck. That's reality. Any service that doesn't have some way of fighting it eventually devolves into a cesspit.

Honestly: they don't need to feed data into their <del>spam cannon</del> adtech to solve spam?

Next up: These guys are selling booze to support AA!

Even companies that are part of the problem need defenses.

If they had promised to only use it for anti spam then maybe.

Just guessing here but:

Now they have been very open about their intentions to use it to target ads and I cannot see any reason they should have to embellish this more than necessary so I guess this is the absolute minimum their lawyers told them they could get away with.

> because either way Facebook is getting your phone number.

Correction - Facebook already got your numbers (and has been doing recommendations based on them).

I've been noticing Facebook recommendations based on Whatsapp numbers I have for many months. So they already have the numbers. But they're probably legally obliged to announce it in a privacy policy change that they will use them to target ads at you.

They surely do have my numbers i.e the phone numbers in my address book (for other people), but do they actually have my number? Every time I visit the facebook website i get a popup asking me to update my profile with my phone number. Note that I do not have the facebook app installed.

Even in your case, there are some possible ways for Facebook to know your number. People on your "friends" list may have allowed Facebook to sync their contacts (and allowed continuous sync) from their address books on email accounts or with the Facebook app on their devices. Especially if any of them are or were using a version of Android older than Marshmallow (6.x), where app permissions are/were granted at installation time on an "grant all or can't-use-the-app" basis, here are the permissions they have definitely granted the Facebook application [1]:

* Contacts

find accounts on the device

read your contacts

modify your contacts

* Phone

directly call phone numbers

read call log

read phone status and identity

write call log

Even if different people in your address book use slightly different names to refer to you in their address books, it wouldn't take a lot for Facebook to figure out what your number is. And just because Facebook asks you for your number, it does not mean it isn't using information obtained from others.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k...

(Check the Permissions section at the bottom of the app page and click on "View details" to see the list of permissions it asks for.)

I find this so creepy. I get recommended people on facebook such as my Phsyio, whos number I don't even have saved. I've just spoken to him on Whatsapp. Bizarre.

Privacy requires both communicators to agree on the level. For example if your Phsyio's address book has your number and that address book is shared with Facebook, then Facebook knows the two of you communicate.

wonderful, a successor for whatsapp is now getting its chance. Everybody i know was using gmail for sending messages, and then they did a few awkward redesigns and told us that we should not expect too much in terms of privacy [1]. Whatsapp got its chance and promised privacy and integrity - and everybody started to use WhatsApp instead of mail (still they have to store the messages on the server for delivery and don't tell you for how long they do that). I guess new startups that do messaging get another chance.

[1] http://techland.time.com/2013/08/14/google-says-gmail-users-...

I remember Telegram saw a huge increase in users shortly after the announcement was made that Facebook would buy WhatsApp.

I bought an Ubuntu phone and tried to get my friends to switch to Telegram. Too much momentum with Whatsapp and only 1 in ten users seems to even understand the privacy issues let along get them to act on it.

Don't give up : )

After some of my friends swiched a few groups, switching has happened naturally group by group since Telegram arrived and today I just have to struggle with my siblings and a local group that also contains a number of elderly people that I won't force to change.

(For those who are not aware Telegram is dimilar to Whatsapp but with less focus on formal verifiable crypto but with other advantages like not-owned-by-neither-Facebook-nor-Google, simpler anf more powerful UI, opensource, a choice of multiple clients, better desktop client, bot API etc etc. The lack of verifiable crypto is still an issue but as long as Facebook owns Whatsapp it seems crypto doesn't help too much :-/ )

i am not so sure here; Malcolm Gladwell says that social things depend on a small number of highly connected trend setters - i would think that these trend setters would understand the privacy requirement because they know that their influence is derived from trust (and trusted communication); Also privacy problems seem to be a major turning point where communication gadgets fall out of use.

They still do not have monetization strategy and chats are not encrypted by default.

Use Signal: https://whispersystems.org/

It uses the same crypto as WhatsApp (same developer), but values your privacy and has properly working audio calls - better than WhatsApp in my experience.

It's essentially WhatsApp minus Facebook. And it's open source.

The company (and person - Moxie) behind Signal, OpenWhispherSystems, worked with Google and Facebook to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger, Google Allo and WhatsApp. It's literally the same protocol and Moxie is a highly regarded cryptographer / security researcher.

Telegram, which some are suggesting, has encryption as opt-in and their encryption scheme has been widely criticized for being dodgy (see: https://moxie.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/).

> Use Signal: https://whispersystems.org/

I like the idea, but don't know of a good method to get my contacts to use Signal as well without making myself look extreme in my views. Any suggestions for this? For example, do you know of any short and crisp messages that get the point across, without getting into a never ending discussion of privacy and its value?

I would recommend that you try Signal, Wire and any other messaging platform with just one or two close people. Once you get a hang of the user experience and see any deficiencies and any annoyances first hand, you can decide whether it's even worth asking all your other contacts to try them.

My advice: Except Telegram, none of the others (Signal or Wire) are ready as a replacement for WhatsApp in UX or speed as of this moment. But Telegram has end-to-end encryption only for device specific, one-to-one chats (called "Secret chat"). Normal chats are only encrypted during transport and are stored as plain text on the servers and on the devices to support quick searching and multi-device/multi-platform sync.

What are you missing with Signal?

Signal is quite slow at message delivery, to start with. It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all. That's the main reason I almost stopped using it.

Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. Coming from Telegram, where I can catch up on messages on multiple devices and choose to switch to a computer keyboard to respond with longer messages, as opposed to a small touchscreen keyboard, I very much prefer having the ability to use different systems. Signal's desktop "app" is just with Chrome and AFAIK, it needs to be authenticated every time (with Telegram, I authenticate my desktop app once and it works fine across restarts). It's still tied to one device (the phone).

Wire allows users to signup or find other people using phone number or email address. Even Telegram depends on a phone number as the sole identifier for a user.

Overall, none of the current set of messaging apps or platforms are extremely appealing to me. All of them have some drawbacks. My dream platform would be a "decentralized and federated" system like email without having to be in individual walled gardens.

> It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all.

One checkmark: delivered to server, two checkmarks: delivered to recipient. Works for me.

> Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. > Coming from Telegram

Telegram has, to my knowledge, either end-to-end encryption or multi-device sync.

The main selling point apart from privacy is that the voice calls works really really well.

Or try Wire [1], which has a much richer feature set (voice calls, video calls, text chat and doodling) than Signal and is also slightly faster and more reliable in my experience. It's also multi-platform, provides multi-device sync and is end-to-end encrypted (although with a different custom protocol compared to Signal, albeit using the older and confusing name 'axolotl ratchet', which Signal no longer uses).

There's a table comparing Wire and other systems here. [2]

I still have Signal and update it whenever there are updates, mainly to see what's new or changed, but prefer Wire for the better feature set and UX. Telegram still remains my most used messaging client due to its UX and speed (even Wire is slow and lacks some basic features like message delivered and message read indicators).

I've been waiting for a long time to switch to Signal (or to Wire), but the improvement seen is quite slow over time (just my experience). Telegram has been moving rapidly on feature addition.

[1]: https://wire.com

[2]: https://wire.com/privacy/

I am not sure if Wire (another messaging app without clear monetization strategy) is better. We might end in the same situation in a few years.

Exactly. The most important reason to use Signal is the trustworthiness of the developers. Moxie is a highly esteemed security researcher / public figure. I trust him to (1) implement the protocol properly (which is really hard) and (2) respect my privacy and (3) not sell out like WhatsApp did.

The thing is, as long as we're using phone numbers as user handles, you have to trust the provider with your phone book. Signal tries as hard as possible to avoid it (all phone numbers are hashed), but if they wanted, they could simply brute force all the hashes since the search space is so small. There's no good solution to this.

Would salting the hashes be an improvement?

I ask knowing very little about their security model.

No, they're doing that already. The issue is that phone numbers are so short that you can just calculate the salted hash for all of them. You don't need any rainbow tables for that.

I agree on that point and would rather prefer something that is a viable business. But it doesn't seem feasible to implement because most people wouldn't pay for messaging anymore. As another data point, Signal doesn't have a monetization strategy either.

It seems like we (most humans who use communication devices) are doomed to be stuck in advertising-based-single-corporate-walled-garden solutions.

> Signal doesn't have a monetization strategy either

They don't have to - Open Whisper Systems is a non-profit with strong community support. It works out so well that they actually pay any contributor a few dollars per commit. That's the best monetization there is for an organization which serves the community.

Wire is VC funded by Iconical/Janus Friis (Skype co-founder who is also the co-founder of Wire) and will monetize with premium features. Can't share more at this point, I'm afraid.

Some of the "basic" stuff is actually surprisingly complex to do without compromising some other aspect IF we at Wire were to stick to always-E2EE-everything mantra. Case in point - delivery notifications. We're actually looking into them now.

Great. I understand that basic stuff could be complex, and I do prefer end-to-end encryption. I can't wait for these (and newer) features to be available so I can move out of Telegram. :)

Has Signal fixed the multi-device issues (like not being able to use multiple Android devices)? Last I checked having multiple mobile devices was impossible.

No but neither does WhatsApp. The reason for this is that it's incredibly hard to properly do end-to-end encryption with multiple devices. It's a trade-off you have to accept if you want secure end-to-end encryption.

The way it works with WhatsApp and Signal is that your key is generated on your phone and never ever leaves it. The web client actually establishes a connection to your phone and routes all messages over it.

Now, the Axolotl ratchet protocol does support encrypting messages to multiple keys (it's what they use for group chats), but doing it properly requires time and effort in order to remain secure.

I know WhatsApp doesn't do it but proper multi-device support is something I require to move. At the moment I just use a private XMPP server so while it isn't technically "end-to-end", it's practically end-to-end as I control the server.

I do that too, but it doesn't work outside of a close group of friends.

For me, multi device support is not important since I have my phone with me all the time, and if I'm on my laptop there's the web client.

Apparently XMPP with Conversations + OMEMO provides secure multi device support, haven't tried it though and I'm not sure if I could get any of my non-tech friends to use it.

We've solved the multi device issue at Wire (wire.com). Causes some challenges - larger payload, not super fast performance in browsers once you hit certain level of connections and messages, but very, very usable.

wire.com/privacy for security whitepaper.

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