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Comment by paraknight | Hacker News Reader

Can someone summarise the article please? I'd rather not accept Spiegel's privacy policy

1:1 conversations continue to be e2e and will forever be (allegedly).

Communicating with a business will not be e2e, per their new TOS.

Simple “Privacy nutrition labels”, like apple recently introduced in the App Store are a neat idea, but because they are self reported and not standardized they can do more harm than good. Eg it’s not clear from the labels that WhatsApp is e2e for personal comms while telegram isn’t by default and never for groups.

WhatsApp confirms they keep some of your personal data including phone numbers from your address book but doesn’t currently share that with Facebook.

Thank you very much

They are also capable of identifying spam so indirectly he confirmed they do read messages.

They don't need to read messages to identify spam: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/how-whatsapp-is-fighting-s...

But they do send recent messages when you report someone.

> Once reported, WhatsApp receives the most recent messages sent to you by a reported user or group, as well as information on your recent interactions with the reported user.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/stayin...

So in theory authorities just have to "report" and then request the messages.

No, that’s not how it works.

If I have received a message I can report that message.

I see. Still there shouldn't be such option and if it exists then how do you know the client won't be sending messages as if you were reporting them?

You don’t think you should be able to report being harassed or spammed?

https://archive.is/LHsgA

TLDR:

The CEO of WhatsApp says - continues to say the whole controversy around the new TOS is fake news - WhatsApp are still growing - Does not like privacy labels because they are confusing due to each app defining what they put on it (example given: you can't tell from them that Telegram doesn't have E2E but WhatsApp does) - Does not like that the German Government wants them to actively help the police track criminals, including silently installing malware on their phone. - Is against weaking their own encryption for the government.

They are growing in users but dropping in usage. No one is deleting a whatapps account, most will delete the app and not use anymore. That allows the ceo to say we are growing. Is usage growing?

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