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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I don't recall this potential bombshell (maybe because it was shortly before a Christmas, and the NYT headline looked like just more of the same ol'):

> And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."

2018-12-18 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/report-facebook-...

2018-12-18 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...

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The problem isn't whether Facebook used private messages for ad targeting (the claim they denied), its whether Facebook used private messages at all.

Who cares if it was for ads, giving third party companies access should be a huge problem with or without ads.

This should make it a no-go for any sane person that is aware of that, unfortunately not many are.

I always try to convince people I know to ditch Messanger/WA/etc. in favor of Signal, and in many cases I've succeeded.

For better or worse, I found that the people willing to keep Signal installed and up to date largely just to get in touch with me was a good proxy for the list of people that really matter most to me.

I didn't win many over on the importance of privacy or Signal, but the willingness of some to put up with it because it matters to me says a lot about my relationship with them.

What is good about signal? It does not allow unique account names (!), but uses telephone numbers - what is just absurdly bad security.

The state can make a duplicate of your sim at any time. Not to mention linking phones to people is relatively easy.

Signal introduced usernames about a month ago.

https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

Complete E2E encryption, only you and the person that you're talking to can read the messages. Yes, having you be identified by phone number is not great but they introduced usernames recently.

that's the money quote, for sure.

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