Not everything is secret in encrypted apps like iMessage and WhatsApp
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
POTS was unencrypted but was difficult for the average person to tap into, and even governments/police had a little difficulty tapping in—they'd have to set up line taps on suspected persons' phones, and or follow calls through telephone exchange Strowger switches before a suspect hung up (the switches dropped out).
Essentially, people in the POTS era had the expectation that their calls were mainly private but they knew that government could gain access under certain circumstances. Also, criminals were aware of this, either they wouldn't use the phone network or they'd use public telephones and keep calls sufficiently short to the point where police didn't have time to trace them.
The POTS system never had absolute privacy and it seems to me that unless there's some major upheaval or reversal of policy—which seems very unlikely —that the best we can expect to end up with is a digital equivalent or similar.
It sort of stinks but that seems the likely reality.
End-to-end encryption with exceptions should not be considered real end-to-end encryption.
Thanks for highlighting this fact.
Also, I'd never trust any FB/Meta products with my information or privacy, especially Whatsapp.
Even with E2E, Meta's ads seem fully aware of my chat topics held over whatsapp.
Are they exfiltrating keywords? From their privacy policy you'd never know because they use the strategy of a single wide-ranging policy for all of their apps and services, so one will never know which apps are doing what.
But if one visits the whatsapp page on apple's app store we can see a bit more truth, Meta self-report that whatsapp collects the following information about you in a non-anonymous, linked way:
- Purchases
- Location
- Contacts
- Financial information
- Specifically linked data for the purposes of advertising
and other data which really doesn't need to be linked to you to be useful, but is anyway:
- Analytics and app usage metrics
Basically whatsapp is the full privacy invading experience of any other Meta property, but the exact wording of your messages are E2E, so they lead with that and hope you dont notice the rest.
Meanwhile other apps presented negatively in that article not only protect your privacy, but don't attempt to mislead you about it.
Before jumping to this conclusion, I think it is worth sending messages about topics that are legitimately random and you have never searched online. This seems more fair, I really doubt Meta would lie about something this important because they could get destroyed with lawsuits..
I'll preface this with the acknowledgement that I'm a middle-aged man in a typical Viagra demographic, although I am single and not sexually active, which any algorithm should know. On this day, I had never seen a FB ad for Viagra.
I was on Facebook one day and became rather frustrated with how clogged my feed was, lots of irrelevant stuff in there, including ads that weren't well-targeted. And I was also logged into my friend's MUD, which supports no encryption at all, and so I ranted a while about Facebook and advertising, and then I said something like "who knows, the next thing I see could be a Viagra ad!"
Then seconds later, I scrolled down on Facebook and was treated to a Viagra ad. It was hilarious, and I couldn't ignore the happenstance of that.
The only plausible way this could've happened is if my ISP is siphoning off text from any unencrypted connection and selling keywords in realtime to Meta?
More realistically, I suppose, my number was just up, and that ad was going to be served no matter what I said on a MUD.
I did actually try to trigger the algorithm by asking the MUD if anyone knew some tasteful window treatments I could purchase, but I couldn't elicit any ads for window treatments from anywhere.