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Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

It is highly unlikely that Facebook can read WhatsApp messages. The reason I say that is that Zuckerberg said the couldn't, repeatedly and explicitly, to Congress. If there was any chance that they could, he would have either not said anything (the context would have allowed for that) or he would have dissembled. As he did numerous other times on other subjects.

As to benefiting from WhatsApp, I'm sure they benefited just fine. They bought it for the contact info from millions of non-Facebook customers that they could use to cross sell. Their growth in, for example, LatAm seems to imply that it worked ok.

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Don't have the transcript - did he say that 'he' couldn't or that Facebook couldn't? Or that other agencies, facilitated by Facebook couldn't?

For example, he said at one point:

> No, we don’t see any of the content in WhatsApp, it’s fully encrypted

It's clear he's speaking about his company. Given Snowden, it would be monumentally stupid to make such a bare faced lie to Congress if they were reading, or facilitating the ability to read, unencrypted content.

Especially as he could have chosen not to say anything so specific. Congressman Schatz was talking about advertising. He could have just said something innocuous like: we don't have the ability to use WhatsApp content for advertising.

What he said there was they don't see, not they can't see.

What he also didn't say there was whether others routinely saw with Facebooks help.

Not saying they do, just saying he didn't strictly say they didn't.

He may of also being talking in the context of using content for advertising, not surveillance.

Finally a lot of intelligence gathering is just based on who has talked to who kind of networks in the first instance, rather than content because:

1. Content can be obfuscated, but not the connections

2. Easier to store and navigate

3. Less noise

If you can read your WhatsApp messages on your phone and you don't control the WhatsApp binary... then Facebook can backdoor WhatsApp to read the decrypted message.

Again, that would mean that he deliberately, explicitly and unnecessarily lied to Congress. That would pretty much require him to be an idiot. He is many things but that's not one of them.

I'm not suggesting that no-one can read them. I have no idea. I am saying that his testimony makes me very comfortable that Facebook is not because he has way more to lose from lying than from not in those circumstances.

Well, maybe that works for you, but I'm more comfortable not trusting anything coming from Facebook...

Your argument here is that you trust Mark Zuckerberg's statement because Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't lie, because if Mark Zuckerberg lied, he would get into lots of trouble, and therefore to avoid getting into lots of trouble, Mark Zuckerberg obviously tells the truth.

I have trouble with this logic. Also, I'm not quite clear - what are the consequences for lying to Congress?

Does not suggest, in any way, that nobody else can read all WhatsApp traffic, only that explicitly-Facebook employees can't.

It would be pre-2013 naive to imagine that, now that WhatsApp traffic is no longer end-to-end encrypted, no use is being made of the change.

> now that WhatsApp traffic is no longer end-to-end encrypted

I'm sorry, what?

Yes. Use Signal, or Mastodon, or WARP 1.1.1.1 if you trust that.

At any time any analytics package or update can just read whats stored client side and send it to Facebooks servers.

Is everyone intentionally ignoring this or actually unaware?

Things stored in plain text client side, can be read in plain text client side and resyndicated.

All this focus on the first transmission being encrypted while in flight and server side is just a bit negligent.

Its a system ripe for abuse and thats it.

> It is highly unlikely that Facebook can read WhatsApp messages. The reason I say that is that Zuckerberg said the couldn't,

Not wittingly.

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