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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

I was under the (naive) assumption that Whatsapp prevents snooping for building a digital simulacrum of you - am I wrong in this? I see the article says that they are working on making the messaging product end-to-end encrypted, how do they know that they need to try and sell me socks because I mentioned socks once in a conversation to my grandmother?

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Whatsapp has end to end encryption. But the metadata is not encrypted, and Facebook uses that data to track you. What is in the metadata? If I'm not mistaken it's the recipient, the time and probably the IP address of where you sent it. So if you start talking to someone new in Whatsapp, it shouldn't be a surprised when Facebook/Instagram will suggest you add them as friends/follow them based on that data. It doesn't know what you send to you're ex on a Friday at 2AM, and it doesn't know that you what you sent to your friend the next day, from her home WiFi.

Ah, ok, so the rule of thumb is you can talk about having murdered a guy, but don't message the person you murdered right before you kill them?

I'm of the same assumption, but I think it only applies to our chats. The value is in the metadata - contact lists, contact photos, locations, connections. I doubt any of that has end-to-end encryption.

It's all end to end encrypted, it's just the other end of the conversation when it comes to contact list sync (etc) is Facebook.

E2E encryption allows for snooping if there are 3 ends.

I guess you can't call it End2End2End or it starts sounding dirty.

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