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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

After Facebook bought what’s app, I’ve never for a moment believed it was secure.

I’ve mentioned on here before about a conversation i had on what’s app and was presented with ads for the topic in Facebook right after. I’ve heard people have had similar stories. What’s app isn’t secure.

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I've also heard many people claim this with Facebook and other platforms. I would love to see a study on this because I'm unsure of the evidence so far. Humans can make mistakes. They can forget typing something into Google, Facebook, etc. I can't even remember the Google searches I did yesterday!

Even then, a lot of the "I was talking about something with a friend and never even Googled it then got an ad for it" can be explained by Facebook leveraging their social graph to target ads if your friend googled something.

They have a social graph that indicates who your probable friends are, regardless of actual Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp friend status; using Bluetooth & Wifi identifiers based on physical closeness.

I'm very skeptical of WhatsApp's security but I'm also very skeptical of these ad claims. We've seen a tone of those over the years, these companies would have a lot to lose if they did that.

Chances are that you're either more predictable than you expected, or it's just random chance and correlation bias. Billions of people use these services, there have to be some freaky coincidences happening all the time. We need something a lot more solid than "I've heard people" to make any conclusion.

But the general point still holds, it's a closed source app made by a company that thrives on data mining, of course it should be considered insecure by default.

My story here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686128

If it’s a coincidence it’s scary cos I have no idea how I posted something in chat to getting an advert for that within a minute.

> I’ve mentioned on here before about a conversation i had on what’s app and was presented with ads for the topic in Facebook right after

I have heard something similar to this but just assumed it was a coincidence. Has this every been proven with verified results ?

I always see claims like this but never with actual evidence or research done.

On Android, I can spoof the microphone access permission so that Whatsapp thinks it has access. I can then log whenever this permission is being used while giving it spoofed data. I have it done this for many apps and unsurprisingly, most try to access the microphone in the background over and over again. I have not done this experiment with Whatsapp yet, though.

What I use for this is XPrivacyLua by M66B, which also has suppory for scriptable hooks in Lua.

For me I don’t think it was a coincidence.

My story is: 2 years ago I was looking for an apartment. My friend who is an agent took me to an apartment. After viewing I messaged him on what’s app saying I liked the place but I want the landlord to put latches on the windows so it’s child safe.

After messaging him I went to Facebook. Scrolling the timeline. A minute later I have adverts for window latches and window grills for child safety.

I didn’t search Google or anything. I was shocked.

It's closed-source/proprietary/non-Free software. Even if it weren't from Facebook, that would be enough to warrant skepticism.

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