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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook

That's a cute loophole you thought up, but whatsapp's marketing is pretty unequivocal that they can't read your messages.

>With end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, your personal messages and calls are secured with a lock. Only you and the person you're talking to can read or listen to them, and no one else, not even WhatsApp

https://www.whatsapp.com/

That's not to say it's impossible that they are secretly uploading your messages, but the implication that they could be secretly doing so while not running afoul of their own claims because of cute word games, is outright false.

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> but whatsapp's marketing is pretty unequivocal that they can't read your messages.

well that's alright then

facebook's marketing and executives have always been completely above board and completely honest

Read the rest of my comment?

>That's not to say it's impossible that they are secretly uploading your messages, but the implication that they could be secretly doing so while not running afoul of their own claims because of cute word games, is outright false.

The thing is, if they were uploading your messages, then they'd want to do something with the data.

And humans aren't great at keeping secrets.

So, if the claim is that there's a bunch of data, but everyone who is using it to great gain is completely and totally mum about it, and no one else has ever thought to question where certain inferences were coming from, and no employee ever questioned any API calls or database usage or traffic graph.

Well, that's just about the best damn kept secret in town and I hope my messages are as safe!

And I'm no fan of Meta...

Where were the Facebook whistleblowers about the numerous IOS/Android gaps that let the company gain more information than they were to supposed to see? Malicious VPNs, scanning other installed mobile applications, whatever. As far as I know, the big indictments have been found from the outside.

>Malicious VPNs

AFAIK that was a separate app, and it was pretty clear that it was MITMing your connections. It's not any different than say, complaining about how there weren't any whistleblowers for fortinet (who sell enterprise firewalls).

>scanning other installed mobile applications

Source?

> That's a cute loophole you thought up, but whatsapp's marketing is pretty unequivocal that they can't read your messages.

If Facebook says it, then... Sorted!

I'm not saying they are sending the content back, but WhatsApp has to read your message or it couldn't display it, so I don't even know exactly what that particular claim means?

They most likely mean their service or their employees, but this appears to be marketing fluff and not an enforceable statement.

I wonder if keyword/sentiment extraction on the user's device counts as reading "by WhatsApp"...

There's the conspiracy theory about mentioning a product near the phone and then getting ads for it (which I don't believe), but I feel like I've mentioned products on WhatsApp chats with friends and then got an ad for them on Instagram sometime after.

Also claiming "no one else can read it" is a bit brave, what if the user's phone has spyware that takes screenshots of WhatsApp... (Technically of course it's outside of their scope to protect against this, but try explaining that to a judge who sees their claim and the reality)

> There's the conspiracy theory about mentioning a product near a the phone and then getting ads for it (which I don't believe)

Well you sure as hell should. Both Google and Apple are making class action settlement payments right now for this very thing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g38jv8zzwo

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/payments-begin-in-95m-...

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

>https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g38jv8zzwo

>https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/payments-begin-in-95m-...

Both are for voice assistants that inadvertently got activated. Extending it to imply that they're intentionally deceiving their users is a stretch.

>https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

It's a pitch deck. For how skeptical HN is about AI startups or whatever, it seems pretty strange to take this at face value.

> Extending it to imply that they're intentionally deceiving their users is a stretch.

If you say so. They directly profited from it.

So? You "directly profit" from picking up a bundle of cash robbers dropped as well doing the actual robbery. That doesn't mean someone who does the former is going to do the latter.

The conspiracy theory exists due to quirks of human attention and the wider metadata economy though.

You mention something so you're thinking about it, you're thinking about it probably because you've seen it lately (or it's in the group of things local events are making you think about), and then later you notice an ad for that thing and because you were thinking about it actually notice the ad.

It works with anything in any media form. Like I've had it where I hear a new thing and suddenly it turns up in a book I'm reading as well. Of course people discount that because they don't suspect books of being intelligent agents.

This psychological effect has a name and I always forget it.

EDIT: Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I Think anyone can be forgiven for not remembering that name.

Are messages and calls data at rest or data in motion? The UI lock feature refers to 'chats' which could be their term for data at rest.

I wonder what the eula says.

"We can't read your messages! They are encrypted on disk and we don't store the keys!"

"What encryption do you use?"

"DES."

My guess is that they are end-to-end encrypted. And because of Facebook's scale that they're able to probabilisticly guess at what's in the encrypted messages (e.g.a message with X hash has Y probability of containing the word "shoes")

That seems unlikely given that they use the signal protocol: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

That would still be very close to educated mind reading

> they're able to probabilisticly guess at

That's not how encryption works at all. At least not any encryption used in the last 100 years.

You'd probably have to go all the way back to the encryption methods of the Roman empire for that statement to make sense

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