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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

In Europe WhatsApp was huge well before Facebook purchased them. From my own experience, the product has barely changed since then, so I don't really feel like it's a Facebook product (yet), and so while I dislike using Facebook services WhatApp is basically fine for now.

Almost everyone I know uses WhatsApp. Funnily enough my family are the only ones who don't, and use iMessage instead. This isn't an active choice though, it's that they are on an iPhone and using SMS, so they get iMessage by default.

This is a long way of saying that for many Europeans, "Just use WhatsApp" feels like an obvious response, why wouldn't you?

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> I don't really feel like it's a Facebook product (yet)

Agreed. When they purchased it, people were obviously concerned, so they promised not to combine it with Facebook Messenger. But, at their F8 conference this year they announced they are going to unify them. So you're right when you say it doesn't feel like a facebook product yet. But, I guess it probably will at some point. I think we all knew this was coming though -- there's not much point in purchasing it if they're not going to leverage it one day.

> In Europe WhatsApp was huge well before Facebook purchased them.

FB purchased them because they were huge.

It is 100% a Facebook product. It is FB. I 100% guarantee all data mined from your WhatsApp account is linked either to your FB account or your shadow FB account if you never signed up.

Sure maybe the "experience" hasn't changed from a UI standpoint but FB is weakening WhatsApp's end to end encryption and mining your conversations so under the hood the experience is radically different.

There is a reason the founders of WhatsApp quit FB post acquisition (literally leaving hundreds of millions of dollars behind) in disgust over the privacy abuses Facebook was proposing. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-co-founder-explains...

is there any evidence of WhatsApp conversations being monitored?

Last I checked:

Actual text of convo: not yet but soon. Metadata: yes.

So you believe whatsapp is not e2e encrypted? Or they're going to roll it back?

They don’t need to roll-back the E2E encryption, they can just access the data right there on the device after it’s decrypted and upload data back to FB via a sidecar. It will start with basic mining of content on the device with ‘anonymous’ summary or aggregate data being uploaded but it’s a slippery slope...

would you trust Facebook after the many ways they've sold your data?

Facebook doesn't sell data

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582

Oh I know! I just mean that the product _feels_ nearly identical (apart from stickers which aren't intrusive) to how it felt pre-acquisition.

>WhatsApp's end to end encryption and mining your conversations so under the hood the experience is radically different.

An anecdotal experience i might just chaulk up to coincidence if not for this but, was talking with a friend in WhatsApp something about babies, my friend was browsing Facebook at the same time about a minute or two after our conversation about babies, my friend started getting a bunch of baby videos popping in her Facebook feed that hadn't been there prior to our conversation.

You are making a bunch of assertions with no basis. WhatsApp's encryption hasn't been weakened. FB can't look at encrypted message content, neither can WhatsApp. A lot of people use WhatsApp because of the encryption guarantees, please don't spread unverified claims.

Facebook owns the communication end points and can do whatever they want with the message contents before they're sent encrypted.

Given their history, I would be surprised if they don't do some on-device metadata analysis.

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