Comment by napolux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by napolux | Hacker News Reader

IANAL of course, but you should read the ToS carefully and you will probably find something that allows them to read your messages anyway.

e2e encryption doesn't forbid to read the messages as you type or read them or read a screenshot of the screen or whatever they can do inside an app :P

They were caught activating your camera by "error" a while ago https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/12/facebook-bug-camera-bac...

As per the experiment you did...

We did the same experiment with a female friend a while ago. We started talking about her pregnancy (a topic we never touched, as she was single and of course not pregnant) in a group chat, specifically targeting her. Sure enough, after a couple of days her fb and instagram were full of strolley ads (but not ours) :)

We are seeing the same thing. More so, my wife sent me a picture of my daughter working on a puzzle. Less than 24 hours later, her Instagram was showing ads for a store that was selling the same type of puzzle as the one my daughter was playing with. So it's not just terms but images too.

putting on my tinfoil hat

yup, do you think all these img recognition stuff is made for fun? companies wants to use them to read our pics on your phones and profile us

Was the picture taken with whatsapp, or with the camera app? Do you have google photos installed? I GP classifies images, maybe also for advertisement?

She used the WhatsApp camera app. We have Google photos too, but we have it configured so that WhatsApp images don't get uploaded.

The more basic explanation is that she has been served ads for puzzles like that for a while, based on previous history and maybe retargeting from the company and you guys only notice the ad because it's more salient after sending a message with the puzzle in it.

There's no reason you'd have noticed an ad about the puzzle in the wash of content and other types of ads.

Are group chats also E2E encrypted?

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