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Comment by davidweatherall | Hacker News Reader

I don't see an issue here at all. I don't think anyone expects whatsapp to be a super privacy focused app? There are plenty of alternative messenger apps that are privacy focused if that's your requirements.

I strongly believe if you asked the majority of users with an engineering background if they thought whatsapp kept a log of "all your contacts and group names, past and present, covering multiple phones you've connected to the account, plus your account info" - they would say yes. These seem like pretty normal things for a messenger app that's focused on UX rather than security to store?

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Not only is it beyond obvious that WhatsApp stores that data, it's actually better than for example Telegram, which also stores all that data, but in addition to that can MITM all your "non-secret" (read: probably all, nobody uses that feature) messages if they choose to.

It's honestly the best we can ever hope for in a free but commercial product. Everything with better privacy would either have to run almost server free or cost money. Both of which would probably kill mainstream adoption for different reasons.

Not to mention that even if everyone was willing to pay $1 per month for a messaging service, now people are instantly identified with a bank account. And even if you allowed bitcoin, since 99.9% of people would just use your bank account, not using one would instantly put a spotlight on you. And who sends messages to whom is still going through their servers. To actually get significantly better privacy, you'd have to essentially use the Tor network or something.

Most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app. Not everyone reads Hacker News and knows the basics of this sector. They are mostly bamboozled by the E2E encryption argument and fail to see the rest.

really? I think that most people using WhatsApp have no clue that it’s E2E encrypted. And that’s amazing!

You even say this yourself in a post you linked to above:

> “WhatsApp’s main appeal to the masses is not its secure, end-to-end encryption, but its general simplicity. “

> “99% of WhatsApp’s users more than likely have no idea how E2E encryption works and they don’t even particularly care about it.”

https://risky.biz/e2e-not-pointless-but/

(I generally liked that post! Which is why this jumped out at me)

> You're wrong - most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app.

How do you know this to be true?

> I feel like you just read the first tweet in a seven part thread and came to a weird conclusion based on an argument that was never made that way.

Why are you being so snarky to anyone who disagrees with you in this thread?

I give regular public talks on this matter and ask entire audiences these questions. Most people do think WhatsApp is sort of vaguely more secure than say SMS or Skype and are surprised to learn that it's more complex than E2E encryption. Most people also aren't aware of Edward Snowden beyond just a name in a newspaper.

I'm not being snarky, just direct (kind of typing these fast to talk to as many folks who are interested as possible) , sorry if it came across badly to you, that wasn't the intention

What kind of talks are these? I'd be surprised if the audience represented the general Whatsapp userbase.

that is argument is a strawman. The general WhatsApp user-base will never watch a tech talk on _any subject_ for the same reason somebody with a driving license will usually not watch videos about how a combustion engine works.

OP is well respected in the infosec community and the fact that he gets attacked and downvoted here tells more about the HN community's ignorance about something that should actually be muscle-memory for anyone who works in Tech. Many commenters here seem to just shovel JSON from A to B in their day jobs, so no surprise that this thread feels more like something you see on Reddit.

Come on, please don't defend one person by slurring others. That just makes this place even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I don't think anyone expects whatsapp to be a super privacy focused app?

the marketing effort by FB to convince users that because of WhatsApp switching to double-ratchet now makes it as secure as Signal suggests otherwise

> I don't think anyone expects whatsapp to be a super privacy focused app

If you only knew the amount of criminals caught in Europe because of the perceived privacy of WhatsAPP.

> If you only knew the amount of criminals caught in Europe because of the perceived privacy of WhatsAPP.

Is there a high correlation between criminals and intelligence?

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