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Also, given that metaphor, if I'm whispering to a friend in a public square, I do have an expectation of privacy in the sense that there should not be boom mics placed everywhere to pick up the smallest of conversations.

The “expectation of privacy” isn’t about what you would expect regular people to do. It’s about what you would expect malicious actors like spies (or just private detectives hired to tail you) to do. You wouldn’t expect to be safe from a detective with a boom mic in the public square—therefore, the square is not a place where you should be having private conversations (even whispered) if you have anything to hide.

At times, a public square is the best place to have a private/secret talk.

Except their point is that the public square is not. "Most convenient" is not the same as best wrt private conversations.

I wouldn't expect to be safe from that detective in my own house, in a sealed room! But I certainly have an expectation of privacy there.

You should expect to be safe from that detective in your own house, because we’ve drawn a very clear distinction—that detective is breaking the law by snooping on what you do in your own private residence. If the police wanted to discover what you were doing in your own home, they’d have to get a warrant in order to not be breaking the law by doing that (“warrant” literally being defined as “a writ making something that’s normally illegal to do, temporarily not, for you, in this situation.”)

Whereas, neither the private detective, nor the police, would be breaking the law by snooping on you in the public square. So either/both would feel empowered to do so, because society does not think such an action is worthy of punishment.

That's pretty circular logic. There are feedback loops between expectations and law, but that doesn't mean the status quo is always correct. The nature of how much surveillance one person can perform has increased by many orders of magnitude. It's worth rethinking how we limit public surveillance.

but on the other hand mob guys when they wanted to discuss something private would often walk and talk, because walking down the street having a private conversation is better than doing it in your office that the FBI has tapped.

I would argue that's exactly what the expectation of privacy is. Malicious actors on the other hand are the reality of privacy.

A better metaphor I've found is a telegram. You dictate your message and someone else inputs the message and someone on the other end transcribes the message and delivers it to the recipient. Is there an expectation that only you and the recipient will know what the message is? No. There are at least two other individuals involved there.

I've honest never understood how the expectation of privacy arose from using Facebook. You are literally sending your information to Facebook.

If anyone is at fault here, it's browser makers who enable sending your data to Facebook. Facebook isn't reaching into your computer "stealing" your data. It's recording what is being sent. Obviously talking about the web site here.

> The “expectation of privacy” isn’t about what you would expect regular people to do. It’s about what you would expect malicious actors like spies (or just private detectives hired to tail you) to do.

This is almost the opposite of how “expectation of privacy” is defined in the legal sense and used in court. Where did you get your idea from? Are you thinking of that term in a security context rather than legal?

For one, you’re defining the term with respect to the spies and not the public, and for two the idea is not whether someone could spy on you given the chance, the whole idea is that when you do something in private, you can reasonably expect it to stay private and that expectation should potentially be protected by law.

“Expectation of privacy must be reasonable, in the sense that society in general would recognize it as such”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

You can use Whatsapp to whisper to your friend. It's end-to-end encrypted.

Encrypted by whom? Who has the keys? WhatsApp is not good for anything private.

As always, it depends on who your enemy is. For the ultra vast majority of people, and in the continuity of the "public place" metaphor, it's more than enough.

Are you implying that Facebook can snoop on the contents of whatsapp messages? That'd be a pretty significant scandal. No matter how disillusioned you are with Facebook, directly and overtly lying to customers about encryption would be next level. Definitely beyond their current tactics of circumspect honesty, e.g. TFA.

Until proven otherwise, I think it is absolutely fair to say WhatsApp messages are, indeed, encrypted end-to-end with no possibility for FB to read the contents.

So, to answer your question: encrypted by users, and the users have the keys. FB doesn't. WhatsApp is definitely good for most things private. Moreso than e.g. Facebook wall or messenger itself, as per TFA.

Sneaky fine print is one thing. Plain lying is another.

I am not sure if understand how encryption works in the context of messaging applications. Unless the two parties communicating generate a set of keys for that particular session there is a high chance that a 3rd party who is operating the service can read their messages.

This is the theory. Now, in practice you can see exactly the same.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2606495/facebook-can-read-your...

WhatsApp messages (even group chats) are by default end-to-end encrypted with keys generated on your device that WhatsApp does not control.

this is what they say, and it's probably true, but you can't actually know without disassembling and analyzing the executable after every update.

it's hard for me to think of something I would want to say that's too sensitive to send over sms but not too sensitive to send over an encrypted chat maintained by Facebook.

At a certain level, if you don't trust someone, you can't do anything.

Let's say you have the source code. You have the source code audited. You have reproducible builds, so you know that the source code is what was used to generate that set of binaries.

How do you know that the platform vendor isn't substituting some other code at runtime? How do you know that the hardware doesn't have a back door? How do you know that the compiler isn't inserting malicious code into the app?

At the end of the day, the only way to prove that something is doing the right thing is to watch what it does. Everything else is an educated guess.

People have built third-party WhatsApp clients, even as Facebook has tried to combat them. What Whatsapp does has been observed to the point where people are able to interact with the server at various points in time. There have been vulnerabilities reported in WhatsApp; no software is perfect, and WhatsApp has made the choice to collect more metadata than, for instance, Signal.

But up until now, nobody has found any evidence that WhatsApp is not end-to-end encrypted as it claims to be. And there are ways for people to find that out, and a lot of incentives for people to do so. Nothing is perfect, and at some point you have to decide to trust someone. I understand that trusting Facebook is fraught. But there are people with good reputations who do good work, like Moxie and tptacek, who do have expertise and can recommend WhatsApp (with an important list of caveats). Whatsapp is not perfect, but most of the options out there are much, much worse.

"end-to-end encrypted"

user1 -- server -- user2

Does this mean user1 to user2 or user1 to server and user2 to server. Both of them are end to end when you define end as client(user1, user2) or server. Again, it was proven several times that real user to user encryption is very rare, I am only aware of SILC doing that. I do not know enough about WhatsApp to believe it is user to user and I do not trust Facebook with anything. You can prove me wrong though.

If the server can decrypt the messages, then it is not end-to-end encryption. That's what the term means.

When you don't hold the encryption key, you can only assume that something is not encrypted. Assuming the opposite is against good opsec.

The creator of whatsapp cared a lot about privacy. So even after selling the company to facebook he warranted that facebook could not read the messages. That was because fb promised him that they had spent a fortune on the company but they didn't wanted to change anything(yeah, if you can believe that I have a tower in the center of Paris to sell you).

Of course, this made Facebook people extremely angry, and they had lots of arguing about it. In the end the man left (losing a lot of money in the process)and of course they can read your messages now.

They had specifically been working on that for something like a year or so. A team inside facebook was created just for that.

Messages are not encrypted by users, they are encrypted by a closed source application that facebook controls 100%. They just modify the software and force an update. It is not magic.

If you can write the source code you can do anything you want.

> The creator of whatsapp cared a lot about privacy. So even after selling the company to facebook he warranted that facebook could not read the messages.

While that's true on one hand, it's also misleading on the other. When whatsapp was acquired in 2014, it wasn't e2e encrypted. Only by 2016 that it was utilizing full e2e encryption.

So while founders did care about privacy, for first 8 years of product life e2e encryption wasn't a thing. It's much easier to add very complex feature like e2e encryption once you have infinite amount of money, coming from facebook.

>In the end the man left (losing a lot of money in the process)

Not earning extra 100s millions of dollars, after you earned many billions, is not something easy to get a sympathy for. Amount of money they left on the table is mostly a rounding error for their bank account.

> The creator of whatsapp cared a lot about privacy.

They didn't even have TLS in the early versions...

https://web.archive.org/web/20110523235136/http://www.yourda...

> That'd be a pretty significant scandal

Facebook's history is a long string of pretty significant scandals that are forgotten a year later because they're not about X, which would be something much more serious and deserving of great reprieve...

> No matter how disillusioned you are with Facebook, directly and overtly lying to customers about encryption would be next level

This feels like an ethical line drawn on your own, and a technical distinction (which we, as technically-inclined people, are wont to make) that means little in the practical legal and sociopolitical frameworks of what constitutes a breach of contract and cause for punishment.

> Sneaky fine print is one thing. Plain lying is another.

Have you read the entirety of FB's fine print regarding its services, including WhatsApp? I haven't.

> WhatsApp end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/28030015/

Instead of us going back and forth about this, perhaps a lawyer can weigh in: is there any way Facebook would survive a lawsuit if this were patently false? Meaning, they delibrerately put in a backdoor to the encryption and are reading messages, knowingly, as intimated in this thread.

And would this be "another day in the life", or would it be a transgression of new levels for Facebook?

It is my conviction that companies try and do what they can to stay within the confines of a hypothetical lawsuit. That's what legal departments are for, essentially. If this were a lie, I would be very, very interested in knowing how they got that document past legal. But perhaps a real lawyer can elucidate matters?

...just not by you.

And get ads in your conversation like real life. This private dialog is brought you by Squarespace.

Or talking to a friend on your mobile phone. Your phone company is not allowed to wire tap the conversation.

Yeah, this is the most apt comparison, and is barely even a metaphor. Shocking that it's not applied to FB.

Your phone company can actually record your conversations so long as they ensure all parties to the conversation are aware they are doing so.

Only if the parties agree and continued use of the service argument isn’t fair.

I believe these protections are related to voice specifically, from what I recall. The law on record has to do specifically with voice data and excludes textual forms of data.

If you were voice chatting over Facebook they would probably have to make you aware if they were listening/processing the data for words. By make you aware, it probably means bury it in the ToS on page 784 in a generic and ambiguous way and that is sufficient for court should someone litigate.

Now when you start looking at voice assistants like Alexa, GA, etc. the waters could get muddier.

Or when you send your friend a letter, the post office isn't expected to open the envelope to read your communication.

Not even isn't expected. Isn't legally allowed.

Unless you're the NSA / CSIS / Etc.

It is not a metaphor, it is an analogy.

as always metaphors are a lousy way to reason

We'll put. Unfortunately in this case, iur legal and often social reasoning works exactly this way.

I think you've put your finger on the metaphor at the heart of this problem: the public square. I've had this thought several times when hearing/reading Jack Dorsey's response to all sorts of issues. We can't have a private owner and rulemaker for our public squares, without losing some of that metaphor's more meaningful implications.

I think there are two big issues at play. One is that public square issue. If that is appropriate to think of FB that way, I think the implication is exactly opposite of what FB execs want: you can't exclusively exploit it for private gain. A (metaphorical) public square is a political (literal) forum. The types of problems that come with a private public forum are exactly those demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The public forum gets auctioned off secretly to political bidders.

The second issue is another (possibly) metaphor broken by a shift in the underlying reality. "Expectation of privacy" means something totally different online. There's no expectation of privacy when you get in your car and drive to the store. But, if a new technology happens to give a company the ability to log your car's whereabouts at all times.

Going from a model where social media is a new instance of the public square I guess I would agree there is no expectation of privacy in the public square, but where the public square metaphor breaks down is that this square is actually owned by a corporation that is taking pictures and wiretapping all the individual conversations taking place in their square and selling the contents thereof to other corporations.

Not just that. Also selling the ability to remote control boom mics and remote control telephoto cameras, so they can send you an advertisement based on what you were looking at.

Isn't the best analogy for the public square the entire internet, not just Facebook?

If you stand in the section of the public square next to Facebook and they listen in, then it's no different than standing by any other website. It's true FB is popular and present in a large portion of the square, but they're not entirely unavoidable in the public square.

It's also true that others can talk about you and share your information in the public square and Facebook will pick it up, but now we're dealing with control over your own information in the public square, which is a different topic altogether.

If somebody follows you even in public space all the time then in most countries it is considered stalking and penalized.

As it should be with on-line tracking too. This intuition, that on-line tracking is akin to meatspace stalking, is behind some of the arguments against that tracking.

Except tracking pixels aren't following you, they already exist on the properties you choose to visit. It's more analogous to mass surveillance of the public square with security cameras.

Most stalking laws apply to a single person who is targeting an individual, in the effort to harass, incite fear, or some other malevolent intent.

But standing in a public square doesn't tell anybody your name or anything else personal about you except for how you look because people usually don't walk around in public with name-tags, thus even in a public square, you will be reasonably anonymous.

At least that's the German interpretation, afaik in the US, it's interpreted a bit differently where everything "in the public" has no reasonable expectation of being "private"?

yes, and unless you're living in a country that has plastered every centimeter with cameras (which is of course objectionable on the same grounds), observations in the public square are ephemeral, nobody's logging your behaviour. It really is a horrible and intentionally misleading analogy.

Metaphors are an excellent way to reason about complex fenomena as they provide a simplified model. Naturally the entity that chooses the metahor dictates the tone, the direction and the likley outcome of the discussion as is the case here.

Here is another one: social media is like a livley party where people can mingle in large and not do large rooms with different degrees of interaction with the totality of the guests. One can see that this is not a metaphor that FB would choose to discuss.

This is a great metaphor. Social Media should be more like a public square - maybe we need to get cities or countries to create a public online space, rather than corporations with monetary focus.

If they want Facebook to be a public square, then they have to take the bad with the good - they should respect free speech, as defined by the constitution of the country they are incorporated in. They should lose the ability to censor anybody, or to kick anybody out of the square (sans illegal activities), or prevent entry to anybody who wants to come in.

> this square is actually owned by a corporation that is taking pictures and wiretapping all the individual conversations taking place in their square and selling the contents thereof to other corporations.

You mean like a mall? There's no expectation of privacy at the mall.

and while it might work for Twitter (with the exception of private messages) I'd also argue that the metaphor falls apart for Facebook since you can have private profiles and groups where there's an expectation of privacy.

Facebooks posting sections explicitly provide segregation and message direction - "Only Friends"

They directly create an expectation of privacy with their controls. The argument that they are making is outrageous.

The methaphor is good. It clearly shows why wiretaping the public on the square is unreasonable.

> So as always metaphors are a lousy way to reason

It is not a metaphor. It is an analogy. It was used as comparison to the living room.

Knowing that, it is hard to follow your point.

Analogies are an equally lousy way to reason, one should study the thing itself and its unique characteristics to determine how to deal with it, not some proxy by analogy.

An analogy is never a way to reason, it's a way to explain and teach. It's been used forever and nobody thinks it's lousy unless they want to complain about something :)