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Comment by throwaway888abc | Hacker News Reader

among those lines of "lot of incorrect or inaccurate information",

>DER SPIEGEL: Soon after you announced your new privacy policies, chain letters started circulating on WhatsApp. People recommended other messenger apps like Signal, Threema or Telegram and said WhatsApp would read phone books and misuse the contacts.

Cathcart: There is a lot of incorrect or inaccurate information. That’s why we have delayed the update and send additional information to users directly in WhatsApp. Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.

>WhatsApp would read phone books and misuse the contacts?

We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.

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Hm, wonder why he declines to answer the contact and phone book question twice, but instead deflects…

Not sure if we can trust anything coming from FB or Google type of large corp under US national security surveillance capitalism state (with conflicting business model against user privacy) regarding what they really do with user data. Any corporation with association with the intelligence agency and the military industrial complex can not be trust.

Have warrant canaries at least shed any light here? It seems companies eagerly hosted them only for them to fall silent soon thereafter. Which, if accurate implies they have received warrants in short order.

Because Whatsapp abuses contacts. I tried to send a message to someone without adding him to my contacts, but I did not find a way to do so in iOS. I had to add that number to my contacts and allow whatsapp full access to those.

And it's actually this information Facebook is interested in, to build the "social graph".

The content doesn't matter, it knows who you communicate with and how often, and that's already a privacy concern (wife wants to know if husband cheats on her with someone else? and so on).

But of course the WhatsApp CEO doesn't mention this ... much easier to say "we don't look at your content" to give it the spin they need.

From the article:

DER SPIEGEL: Do you share these numbers with your parent company Facebook?

Cathcart: No, we don’t. The updated privacy policies will actually not change anything globally in our ability to share data with Facebook.

How about hashed identifier derived from phone number ?

Https://wa.me/+(country code)(phone number)

Assumably because they know who you talked to, when you talked to them and for how long and with an approximate location. They also have a good idea of what you were doing at the time from their cookies / "facebook integrations" over the greater internet.

"When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name."

That's the weakness of current chat tools right there. They can't listen in but they do know when you talked to whom and how long, how often, etc. In fairness, Signal and Telegram are similarly dependent on phone numbers. The traffic might be encrypted but even just knowing who talked to whom, when is useful.

Yeah, this was demonstrated greatly in the Navalny/Bellingcat investigation of his poisoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhi6jts97I . They bribed the appropriate providers to get phone call records and could see how the agents would be ringing each other and up the chain of command around the time of certain events. If an "enemy of the state" could do this, imagine what the state, or the owners of the data, could do.

Funny as if saying "just the phone numbers and not the names" should make us feel safe, Facebook already asks for your phone number, and could correlate your data that way.

i believe signal uses the phones contact list, but telegram manages its own contact list, and i can add telegram contacts contacts without knowing their phone number or adding them to my phone contact list. i can also block my number from being shared with anyone.

the only thing the number is needed for is to create a new account.

> When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name.

> we can hand over, for example, the IP address, user name or profile photo

Seems to me that they don't have to collect the name from the phone book, they just match it with the profile information (at least)

We can only see the profile photo, which we obviously couldn't match in our worldwide facial recognition platform which automatically tags every picture of yours.

>> phone books and ... contacts?

> messages ... calls ... location

The response ignores the question.

Since they ID you by telephone number then they need at least the phone numbers in your contact list to let you know if people on your phone are using the service. I agree that step should be optional though and allow you to manually put in someone else's phone number and never need WA to rifle through your contacts.

That sounds like a canned response carefully prepared by a lawyer (if indeed it's repeated word-by-word which I can't check due to Spiegel's lack of privacy options). I guess the privacy invasion comes in via linking to Fb and graphs of who's-messaging-whom.

Wonder what the alternatives are? I'm no expert and might be completely wrong but my assessment re usual suspects goes like this: Telegram? No E2E! Signal? Ceased to update their self-hosting software! Matrix: not a really open protocol to begin with!

Over ten years ago, XMPP used to work just fine (and IRC before that) so I'm just wondering why we have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Messaging isn't exactly rocket science.

I won't tie my online presence to a proprietary vendor with no alternative clients and service providers since that's strictly worse than what we have today. Remember WhatsApp started like those other providers but then got acquired by Fb.

So it's SMS/MMS for me I guess.

Matrix is very much an open protocol. Just because the team who created it works together professionally doesn’t somehow make it less open, given we set up the Foundation to keep it neutral. (And the fact our jobs depend on it being successful acts a useful motivator not to screw it up).

For the record XMPP worked 10 years ago, and continues to work today (of course it has changed a lot).

If you have Android contacts then Quicksy is on the app store and an easy jump from WhatsApp, with the benefits of an open federated network. I believe iOS is planned, but in the meantime Siskin is a decent choice.

There is a lot of development activity going on in XMPP across a very wide range of projects, and I'm hopeful that as people realize that all this centralization onto single providers has been a recipe for abuse of power, that open networks may gather more public interest.

> I guess the privacy invasion comes in via linking to Fb and graphs of who's-messaging-whom.

In the interview he explicitly says that they do not share phone book data with Facebook.

...yet

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