Comment on WhatsApp deletes over 6.8m accounts linked to scams, Meta says

Glitterbomb@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• WindyRebel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’ll my best guess is you have numbers associated with profiles and maybe the numbers get reported as scams through various watchdog orgs or people reporting to Meta directly?

  The profiles aren’t encrypted I don’t think?

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  • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    What’s your best guess at how whatsapp manages to generate AI summaries of your private messages without ever reading the private messages?

    pcmag.com/…/meta-ai-summarize-your-whatsapp-chats

    Even a cursory attempt at defending these companies is a bad joke.

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    • WindyRebel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      First, if I were to take a guess I would assume that it can be coded to give the AI access to messages because it’s part of the encryption protocol? I really have no idea because I don’t write code or deal with backend stuff.

      Second, I’m not defending the tech company. I’m coming up with a hypothesis as to why something may be possible. I’m not saying it’s probable.

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      • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The concept of “End to End Encryption” (E2EE) is that one end encrypts the data, it passes through transport, and the only person who can read the decrypted data is the intended receiver.

        In the case of WhatsApp, this should mean:

        • Your phone (WhatsApp app) encrypts a message
        • Your phone sends the encrypted (“unreadable”) message to Facebook
        • Facebook sends the message to the intended receiver
        • The receiver decrypts the message

        The whole “Meta AI summaries” thing has to run on their servers. Large language models small enough to fit on a phone don’t produce sensible output yet, and your phones battery would drain very quickly. Since each message is (supposed to be) encrypted with different keys, no human nor computer can make sense of the encrypted data without the keys to decrypt it. For their servers to provide a “summary of your chats”, they have to be able to read the content of the messages. Thus proving that the whole “end to end encryption” in WhatsApp is either false, or made entirely useless with them sending all messages to themselves without E2EE.

        The only proof that would invalidate this is evidence of the LLM running locally on device. Even then, the way some of WhatsApp’s services work (like notifications, WhatsApp Web) creates some serious doubt on the “E2EE” claim.

        It is absolutely essential that any communications platform claiming “E2EE” proves this by making the client-side code (the stuff running on your device) fully open source. A proprietary app, like WhatsApp, by definition makes it harder to fully understand its inner workings, and thus fully verify the E2EE claim.

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      • ifItWasUpToMe@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That’s not really how encryption works. If their chat bot can read/parse the message, then it has the keys, which means meta would have the keys. This doesn’t mean they absolutely are reading your messages, but it does seem to mean it would be possible.

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    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s an opt-in feature. In settings, users will be required to enable Private Processing, which Meta describes as an “optional capability that enables users to initiate a request to a confidential and secure environment and use AI for processing messages where no one—including Meta and WhatsApp—can access them.”

      That’s how.

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    • bob_omb_battlefield@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I found technical details of the private processing in this whitepaper: ai.meta.com/…/private-processing-technical-whitep…

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• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  That’s what the report button is for.

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