WhatsApp has removed answer to “how do I choose not to share data with FB”
faq.whatsapp.com
faq.whatsapp.com
In order to opt out, you needed to have an existing account and take specific actions around the time you agreed to the 2016 new terms of service. Based on the internet archive, this article was removed after April 20, 2018, and before May 5, 2018. When it was most likely obsolete (I don't recall the specific deadlines for accepting the 2016 TOS)
On the plus side, the various terms of services are all available without digging in the internet archive https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/terms-of-service/revisions
Comparing https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/updates/terms-of-service/?lan... to https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/terms-of-service-eea/?lang=en, the EU version removes
- “Ways To Improve Our Services. We analyze how you make use of WhatsApp, in order to improve our Services, including helping businesses who use WhatsApp measure the effectiveness and distribution of their services and messages. WhatsApp uses the information it has and also works with partners, service providers, and affiliated companies to do this”
- “We offer specific features and services to businesses and other organisations such as providing them with statistics regarding their use of our Services.”
- “Affiliated Companies. We are part of the Facebook Companies. As part of the Facebook Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, the Facebook Companies as described in WhatsApp's Privacy Policy, including to provide integrations which enable you to connect your WhatsApp experience with other Facebook Company Products; to ensure security, safety, and integrity across the Facebook Company Products; and to improve your ads and products experience across the Facebook Company Products. Learn more about the Facebook Companies and their terms and policies here.”
In fact, Facebook would be irrational not to train their algorithms on every single data point, regulations and opt outs be damned. And that people itt have found that their data says opt in no matter what they pressed in 2016 is believable evidence for that.
As always: Don’t forget what Facebook has done in terms of data leaks, political skew, impact on the pandemic and damage of teenagers on instagram. Do not forget how well they kept this under wraps and how little remorse they have, except in proportion to the fine.
Given the past years, we know that people working at Facebook are literally mustache-twirling cartoon villains, and I wish this was exaggerated.
That they fine the corporate entity as well, sure, why not but that they also explicitly make it known that they will seek criminal charges against actual human beings who made specific choices and decisions to ignore certain major rules. Even if the top brass cover their asses with lawyers under such a regime, asking any subordinate to break rules will always be weighed with the question of "and will I be one of the ones who gets literally jailed for this being uncovered in court?" That wholly new chain of consequence-weighing might at least make blatant disregard for legal limitations more problematic for everyone at a company like FB and so many others. It might also make the leadership hesitate more because they'll rarely be sure if an employee they asked to do something illegal isn't also gathering evidence against them as he or she violates the rules under their orders.
Punishing malfeasance by applying nothing more than fines to multi-billion dollar corporate entities as abstractions is absurd nonsense. And it's funny in its hypocrisy, considering how "tough on big corporations" is a popular politician's theme that gets votes, only to be forgotten by both politicians, and apparently, voters as well once someone is in a position to make rules with real weight.
Or I can’t just not use WhatsApp. It’s not like it does anything more than any of the other messaging services.
Based on what I see in the archived article, it looks like accepting the TOS was a "roadblock" popup in the app -- you couldn't continue using the app without accepting the terms. Any accounts which hadn't accepted the terms after two years could have simply been closed for inactivity.
You could probably look at the many news articles that were written back then to get some idea of the timelines. Although, most news articles weren't written with the perspective of delaying terms acceptance as much as possible.
(Also, I had meant to say I didn't recall the specific deadlines... There certainly were deadlines given specific circustances of each account)
Everything is still working.
I just hit "<" when it pops up.
For the 2016 tos, we definitely roadblocked. I think it was display it once every X days, and after Y days, you couldn't send messages until you accepted the tos, server enforced. If you still didn't accept, your account would be idle and would be deleted 45ish days after the roadblock.
But even though that's a lot of things and is super important, most days there wasn't urgent work on that, and I'm pretty good at debugging weird stuff, so I debugged a lot of weird stuff. When you have millions (or billions) of users, 'one in a million' stuff happens a lot.
Diagnosing bugs in FreeBSD and fixing them (or convincing upstream to fix them), diagnosing bugs in client platforms and finding workarounds (also trying to get them fixed, but it's hard to get a lot of movement even when bugs are general and just nobody else diagnosed it), diagnosing bugs in ISP networks and finding workarounds (almost nobody follows through on email to whois contacts, even if you're sending from @whatsapp.com), diagnosing issues in our hosting provider's network and convincing them to fix it, etc. If I had stayed longer, I'd have probably started diagnosing bugs in the FB infra and Linux, but I more or less left when we were almost done with our FreeBSD hosts and it took a while to wind down everything, so it was a good transition point to more or less not touch the service where it was running on FB.
In terms of privacy, I'm not going to say much. I think it's fair to say our goal was to only have the necessary private information to provide service. Messages aren't kept on the server beyond delivery, have a limited time frame waiting for delivery, address book is numbers only, no names, etc. Signal certainly stores less information on the server than WhatsApp. You can certainly read about our many failures (no client to server encryption, then poor encryption, and eventually good encryption) among other well reported issues. End to End Encryption took a long time to develop and deploy, but it sets a bar that hopefully other providers will meet (or exceed).
Even when the option was there, it was hidden behind the 'read terms and conditions' link.
If you missed that, there was an opt-out in Settings > Account > Share my account info. But the site implies that option is only available for the first 30 days.
And even if you, despite their best efforts, opt-out, it's a very limited opt-out:
The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.
Those terms are written by engineers with good intentions, but you have to remember your data is subject to the whims of unscrupulous PMs with targets to hit ;)
I know it's hard to switch if most of your friends are on WhatsApp, but you can talk to them and switch together.
The best way to get your friends to switch messengers is to not be reachable on the bad ones: ie delete your accounts and uninstall the apps.
Retaining your account on bad platforms makes those platforms more attractive to other users and makes the world worse.
But it has a native bot API and can handle multiple clients on multiple different devices without any issue.
Even niftier: In some countries Facebook created this "FreeBasics/internet.org" scheme where access to Facebook services is free. When travelling Indonesia WhatsApp was the only way to reach the landlords of guest apartments, taxi drivers, ... not even regular SMS/text.
The strength of the network effect can be hard to break.
When you cave and install WA, you make it harder for the next parent, just as all the ones before you made it harder for you.
If you want to be rid of these things, you can't get there by using them because you think you have to.
The vast majority of people don't think Facebook is the abhorrent service it is, and an even larger majority don't realize WA is owned by Facebook.
That's not true. A lot of people are a lot more concerned about their privacy these days.
You can obviously argue that they can't siphon away information at the server level; but if you don't trust whatsapp/signal/telegram at that level then you're boned anyway because they could quite easily activate the 'whatsapp web' function and exfiltrate information via whatsapp servers.
Ideally we'd have clients and servers and server operators as distinct and uncoordinated individuals, which would have to work in conjunction with each other to unravel your messages: but there's no incentive for them in place to do that.
I, a server operator, can pass encrypted traffic, that data is encrypted with clients I don't/can't control.
I, a client software developer can make encrypted traffic, but messages can only be passed on networks I can't control. (and if it didn't, this would be easy to spot).
I, a server software developer can write software which allows traffic to be passed but does not promote an operator to exfil even encrypted data.
We have this with Matrix, IRC, XMPP etc;
IMO if you're going to use Whatsapp; it's the same as if you use telegram or signal; I understand that this opinion is controversial but you're choosing convinience over security and E2E doesn't mean anything if you have one entity controlling the ends.
E2EE is not the main concern any more for most though. Most messengers offer some form of it, and you're correct in saying it probably won't prevent the company from accessing your data. However, I think the point is about which company to trust with this sort of power. Actually, it's more like "which company is least likely to do [bad stuff] with my data?"
Currently, facebook is much higher on that list than the signal foundation -- at least in my book.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a cross-platform, free, secure, open-source communications platform. I’ll take it for now.
Given that WhatsApp uses the Signal tech (largely). I’m always surprised that what’s app still reigns supreme.
In the UK, everybody uses Whatsapp, from friends and family to businesses.
That won't change until communication platforms are forced to make their products interoperable with each other. I can't use anything else because nobody else does, I would not even be able to book my Dog in to the Groomers because they won't answer the phone and only respond to Whatsapp.
E2E encryption can protect contents in transit with TOS for communication platforms to join the Multi-provider network stating they cannot analyse the contents of received messages in-app.
... you ask people to use an alternative. I got my entire family on to Signal about a year ago. I keep asking the BBC not to use WhatsApp. We'll see.
Good luck getting businesses to move away from Whatsapp. I deleted my account and was able to get friends and family on Signal, but thankfully I don't have any businesses I interacted with that used Whatsapp (or Facebook). I might be missing out on products and services... But hey, at least I don't know what I'm missing. :)
It seems that you can still get the SMS import by first installing an old version that supported it and then upgrading (see [1]). But obviously this is only an option for techies, not moms and pops.
[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8887#issu...
I asked my son's friends if they had each other's phone numbers in case the 'party' got split up and needed to arrange to meet at a time/landmark. They pretty much all said "we've got each others insta". Today's yoof don't SMS, so SMS integration has a decreasing lifespan.
People's lives are so busy (I know this because that's what everyone says), who's scrolling back through their SMS conversations, and why?
It seemed like a lot of people weren’t aware that this had already been happening, before the announcement to make the opt out unavailable.
This is naive.
First of all, I'm a big fan of Signal and Matrix, but it is hard to overstate how much more polished WhatsApp is in comparison. There's just a lot more friction for grandma. There are also considerably fewer resources behind the alternatives, so things like this [0] happen (tl;dr - it took Signal over seven months to fix a bug in the Android client that would sometimes send messages to the wrong person!!)
Second, the problem doesn't end with grandma. It's the network. There are literally billions of people on WhatsApp and there are places where WhatsApp is the default method of communication for everything. Schools and kindergartens use it for announcements and to communicate with parents. Service providers give out a WhatsApp number to contact support. Friends and family are all on WhatsApp in established groups with a long history that everyone wants to keep. Trying to switch everyone over is futile. Not being on WhatsApp isn't an option. It is that big.
[0]:https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10247
[0]: https://www.socmedsean.com/solved-how-do-i-clear-the-faceboo...
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/ios-15-beta-still-hasnt-fixed...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/search?q=video+player&restrict...
It's an option for me!
When they were launching, and for most of their first couple of years, Whatsapp spammed the bejaysus out of me. My mummy told me never to play with spammers.
Out of all the non-whatsapp choises, Telegram is the least bad (yes, no E2EE, relax) and is something you can actually get your boomer-aged parents and their parents to use with very little help.
Even ignoring the network effect, for most people the user experience is a _much_ higher priority than things like E2EE. And the trade-offs Signal makes in the way they've implemented E2EE (e.g., if you drop your old phone in a toilet, change your phone number when you get a new phone, switch between iOS and Android, etc, you just... lose your entire message history) are just not acceptable to the average person. I suspect many people would not believe how many people I've heard complain about Telegram because the _stickers_ apparently aren't as nice as things like WeChat.
I'm fairly certain that long term the push to move non-technical users to Signal is going to wind up doing more harm than good. It's being sold as "good for privacy because it's E2EE". People are going to use it, have poor experiences, and then drop it. The next time someone says "use this app because it's good for privacy and has E2EE" it's going to be a much harder sell trying to overcome "Yeah, but the last time I tried that I lost all the message history with my deceased daughter when I bought a new phone."
On level of polish I would say WhatsApp and Element are the same (i.e. rough) while Discord is more polished. I do not like Discord and their business but they have created one of very few polished chat clients.
XMPP was the correct answer 20 years ago, and (with an encryption layer) it's the correct answer now.
Matrix and activitypub are also valid answers.
I set it up for my elderly parents who just got their first smartphone a few months ago, and it's been going very smoothly.
What are the complications that others seem to be having?
Seems like it has everything a non-technical person would want.
Yeah, but grandparents (or whoever you are trying to introduce to Matrix) are not supposed to set up and run a Matrix server. If you meant that as an end-user you are having issues with the server you are on, perhaps you should use a different one. I have been using Element for quite a while now with matrix.org as my server, and I did not have any problems with the server I am on. The client is indeed buggy a bit[1]. Some bugs have been fixed since then though. If you run into bugs, report them please.
[1] There are many clients now for Android alone, for example, from F-Droid. Perhaps they are less buggier. I do not know.
Again, there may be bugs. They will get fixed. It happens all the time with any software. Element is maturing. It is really easy to just download and use without any problems.
Edit: I forgot Google Hangouts which is very buggy and where it is almost impossible to add new contacts.
XMPP, Matrix (Element), Wire, Briar, Ricochet, whatever.
Huh? Just do it. Install it, then help her if you have to, similarly to how you introduced WhatsApp (or whatever else) to her, for example. They may not like change, but if they are capable of using another piece of IM software, they are capable of using any of the mentioned ones.
I installed Linux for many people who have never seen Linux their entire life. On some occasions I explained how to do something, and that was it.
I think the point is that you don't need to help her for apps like WhatsApp, they manage to figure it out because it's simple enough.
Why?
I was under the impression that these days the NSA and other government agencies prefer perfect security since if they can crack the security then other governments could too. By forcing imperfect security the US would give up a large part of its advantage.
Every post you make
Every pic you fake
Every mouse you shake
Every proof of stake
I’ll be watching youAnd their chats are not even E2E encrypted except their 'secret chats' but they work only on one device and don't work in groups.
* Build and install a custom client with your own API key, and don't share it with anyone
* Use an Xposed module (already exists) or Cydia tweak if you're willing to root/jailbreak your phone
As for the encryption, it depends on your threat model. Yes, full E2E by default would be ideal, but even with their default cloud encryption they're probably a lot more trustable than Facebook & co. According to their FAQ, the data is scattered across servers in multiple jurdistictions, so a lot of governments would have to team up to get any data out of them.
But also, how do you handle convenient cloud backup/sync with full E2E? WhatsApp and Viber both constantly manage to lose messages for me when restoring after a device reset or switch.
Having to use patched libraries and burner phones for SMS verification isn't really something I want to get into =)
Compared to Telegram and Discord where basic bots aren't a lot more than a fancy curl call, this is just bonkers.
Well, with WA I know they won't have access to it, except the metadata. With telegram I have to trust they they are probably more trustable.
And yes I know the metadata is more valuable anyway to the likes of FB.
But yeah the ads are going to be in Channels for now, I don't even use those. But I doubt it'll stop there. For me it's a bit like a bridge they cross that leads to a dark path. I don't mind paying for a good chat service but not with ads.
> But also, how do you handle convenient cloud backup/sync with full E2E? WhatsApp and Viber both constantly manage to lose messages for me when restoring after a device reset or switch
I don't really care about backing up my messages. But I send all my chats through Matrix now (with Bridges) so it keeps a log for me there (but on my own server). But I have not see this kind of issue with WA in the past when I did use that feature.
The fact that I recieve advertising in FB for things discussed in a 1:1 chat in whats app, minutes after discussing them, means it's not secure. E2E is end to end, not end to FB to end.
I think Telegram (group) chats are encrypted, just not end to end.
On a technical level, Telegram is are as secure as Facebook Messenger. Both offer transport encryption and optionally E2EE secret chats. Actually, I might trust Facebook more (on a technical level) because they don't have Telegram's disastrous history with home-brewed crypto protocols.
After all, everything goes through WhatsApp's proprietary clients and servers, we don't know what voodoo they do along the way. Just because they claim it's E2E encrypted, doesn't really make it so, I'd imagine. Has their E2E encryption been confirmed independently?
The only place it doesn't use it, is when you are talking to WhatsApp Business users, as the business API needs access to the messages.
Did you see the source code? Or do you trust Facebook?
Let’s not forget the FTC hookup for Netflix by Obama and the eventual payout when he left office.
Or Ajit Pai who came from Verizon to run the FTC and undid the Obama era changes favorable to Netflix and inimical to Verizon.
——-
I hardly see any of these events as triggers for the mass migration to apps like Signal. The network effects seem impregnable for now.
Though I totally agree linking an IM account with a mobile number is bad. There's benefits too like discoverability and ease of use but I prefer something where I could be anonymous and have multiple accounts.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/irish-data-privacy-watchd...
It's still not the majority but at this point there is a significant user base for signal, much more than one year earlier.
All the public communication happens on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Private comms are on whatever those platforms have, or Telegram and Discord. Only a minority have Signal and most don't want to hear about it.
When I tell them there's an internal issue because you can't change the world and give more power to the people by using anti-users tools like those, they look at me like I'm from another planet. There's a long road ahead.
I never understood why activists would adopt pseudonyms, but refuse to use the (relatively) secure communication channels we provided, in favour of Twat and Faceache. Being involved with Indymedia was risky - it was infiltrated by undercover cops, and some of the people posting to the newswire were probably involved in criminal acts (e.g. criminal damage).
That's fascinating, because when I joined similar groups last year, they all emphasized using Signal for private comms. They were, in fact, the only people I talked to Singal on, because nobody else I knew really used the app back then.
Perhaps there's a stronger privacy culture in some activist groups versus others.
- groups where privacy is a matter of personal security will actively use Libre Software and their own services because it's just too important
- groups emerging from the technical world will naturally adopt Libre software and decentralized services because tech doesn't scare them
- everyone else comes from a world where FB/Twitter/Instagram is the norm, so when they group together on issues related to the physical world they will continue to use the digital tools they are used to
There is a real work of deconstructing our tools and the prevalence of big tech in our digital world, just like there was a necessity to deconstruct the position of white males in a patriarchal, occidental society.
I was working on the tech end, and a lot of our time was spent transferring events from Facebook to other platforms by hand. I asked, "Why are we on Facebook? These guys are completely against us!" and everyone looked patronizingly at the old guy and said, "We need to get our message across in every platform!"
They were completely clueless, and I loved them, but I had to leave.
In particular, there was one guy working with us who had spent their whole lives working for [large company directly opposed to this org].
I asked him once in passing when he left and he didn't answer. I thought nothing of it, but he started to refuse to answer other questions - not in a hostile way, just always changing the subject.
Then I talked to someone else, and this guy had tried to sneak himself in as a "superadministrator" in another project, even after he'd been explicitly told not to. They asked him about why he did that, and again, he just acted as though he had never been asked.
More of this stuff happened. Particularly, the whole "gaslighting and pretending you never answered the question" got to me.
Eventually I brought this up in a meeting with a few people in charge. Everyone thought I was crazy - but trying to hack into a system and then refusing to answer questions, and being thrown off that project?
I left.
The worst part was I liked the guy, and we never argued or anything.
> I asked, "Why are we on Facebook? These guys are completely against us!" and everyone looked patronizingly at the old guy and said, "We need to get our message across in every platform!"
This is actually a point I totally agree with: you have to talk to people where they are, especially when they don't already agree with you. But in my opinion it sends a wrong image and such orgs should use Libre Software and decentralized networks first, and only on top of that use FB/Twitter as a copy-paste of the main platforms.
There's a very important step to do that is to categorize who your target is. Basically it's a bunch of concentric rings: those who agree with you, then those who are questioning and need a bit of information, then those who aren't thinking about the subject yet... you have to convince those around you, who will convince those around them, and on and on. In that vein, sticking to decentralized platforms first and gradually growing makes a lot of sense
Facebook know who is in the group and what they post but none of it is necessarily confidential information.
On the other hand, the daycare as part of their operations know lots of details of your children's development, health issues, allergies, mental health, educational attainment and special needs. They know if you are getting divorced, who has custody, if there are dangerous people in the child's life and so on.
Is keeping this private really in the same ballpark as choosing to have a WA group or not?
But anyway, it's just not a priority for a daycare.
Guaranteeing that for example staff don't respond to enquiries about children's health unless it's from the parents is a priority.
I've broken contact with a reasonably tech-savvy part of my family. I have to decide between being informed about current events and hoping the next Meta leak doesn't have my full name, number, hometown, and possibly group memberships.
I saw a lot of those messages too around that time but since then most of them have moved back to WhatsApp as most of their contacts are still there.
[1]: not exactly the same, because AFAIK Whatsapp is E2E encrypted, but Facebook still has access to all the metadata, which are way more that what I want them to have.
It just feels futile. As long as companies need to turn a profit and governments can surreptitiously surveil their citizens there's no long-term solution. We can move to the next platform until that becomes popular (and hence worth monetizing and surveilling), then the next, repeat.
Its a technical solution to a political problem.
Ensuring you received an unmodified phone without a nefarious operating system or baseband is probably harder.
Not on iOS.
No, they have reproducible builds.
Everything else you said apply even more to other apps, not sure why you think Signal is more suspicious in that regard. But with reproducible builds and the .apk they have on their website, you can check that the source matches it every time you update, which is not something you can do with most other apps.
Ah, I see on Android they do. Not iOS according to an open github issue since 2015.
I am suspicious of signal because everyone says "use Signal it is secure" and it is popularly known for this. Because of this reputation for security, users will get comfortable and talk about their illicit activity, which makes it an attractive target for power brokers the world over. Every app could have this problem, but Signal is the one everyone keeps saying is secure, so it's the place people will spill their secrets.
Reproducible builds on android look cool, but I wonder if there are other threat models on Android than dishonest builds of the program itself.
I'm semi-conspiratorial, semi-fatalistic about society's ability to change politics politically / non-technically. There are too many who are too apathetic (and I might even be one of them by already being semi-fatalistic) that anchor the current system in perpetuity. My conspiratorial side says this is by design, whilst my fatalistic side says it's human nature (essentially Hanlon's razor).
Revolutionary change is often a case of "it" getting (a lot) worse before it gets better, but with the inevitability of returning to the previous status quo just with different bums on the same seats. (I've previously stated my desire to write a novel based on this concept in order to try and explore the inevitability, or otherwise, of this 'revolution for nothing' and the changing priorities of individuals as their levels of power increase from zero to monarch and how that may just be a limitation of civilisation).
I think we need a DNS-like service that simply hold small encrypted blobs, just big enough to contain an IPv6 address.
When you "add" someone to your list of contacts, you are giving them the key to decrypt the blob that you update with your IP.(Complications ahoy here but this is the basic idea.)
That way, people can message your phone/computer-of-choice direct with whatever E2E protocol you want. No middleman.
Then you need an app layer built on that to manage messaging, video calls, group chats etc. But that app layer could be open and free. People often like some XML based protocol from the 2000s, but as long as it is secure - whatever.
But other issues: using it from multiple devices? Using it from different locations?
Maybe it'll work with a tor hidden service or something because at least that stays the same (I think some chat apps already so that)
Once you have that, everyone can run their own hosting. Everyone could have their own Matrix server, or whatever flavour of messaging you want.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Story_of_Ah_Q
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_wahre_Geschichte_des_Ah_...
The problem with this is that you have far too many keyboard warriors who read clickbait headlines and decide they want to change the system.
The people actually working in that system have decades of knowledge about how it works. That isn't always a bad thing. They may understand how to navigate a complex system to get the real change you want, to actually happen.
Imagine if people in this "decentralized, trustless future" saw a YouTube video of an aircraft landing and came to the conclusion that they didn't use enough rudder on landing, without understanding the nature of a 25 knot crosswind.
They'd vote, the pilots would be fired, and aviation safety would drop another notch because the people voting didn't understand the scope of what they were voting on, because they weren't trained pilots.
I wholeheartedly do not believe in making aircraft safety a democratic process.
Horses for courses.
Winston Churchill's quote: “…democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
But if I read you correctly ("society's ability to change politics") ... this is how the US got things like January 6th.
It's completely destabilizing for a functioning democracy when relatively small groups of like-minded people can coordinate over private channels and rally themselves into something crazy.
The reason politics "works" (and I use that term lightly these days) in this country are because things are all done out in the open.
If you don't like "snooping" and would prefer our politics be done in the dark ... that isn't freedom, that's back-channel politics. We don't want that, I don't care if the left or the right is doing it.
I am actually in favor of E2E encrypted chats and the like. But we need to keep politics out in the light of day. If you want to change the system, run for office.
That aligns with my position. I fundamentally believe in the necessity of transparency in politics. What I don't believe in is the the necessity of government / law enforcement snooping on E2E encrypted chats.
I don't want back-channel politics, I want back-channel private conversations amongst the citizenry. If this enables some back-channel politics then that's a price I believe is worth paying partially due to the fact that the end results of political decisions and actions are, by necessity, public.
Politicians should, by policy, have their political communications recorded (not made public, but archived "just in case") since they're working for the public. Those who avoid such scrutiny should be named and shamed if it can be proven. Utopian, I'm aware.
I think people (including the government) noticed it a long time ago.
From 2015:
'According to CNN, "[t]he same technology that keeps a conversation private between you and a family member also gives a safe haven to a terrorist in Syria and the person in the United States he's trying to recruit to commit an act of mass murder."'
Am I missing something?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/ajit-pai-urges-s...
[1] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2021/sep/1/fcc-takes-fu...