Comment on How do yall go about meeting new people while still maintaining a decent level of privacy?

Poutinetown@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They asked about privacy, not security. WhatsApp is profiling you.

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  • Poutinetown@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Except it is more private than alternatives like Instagram DMs and FB Messenger (ironically all by the same company), which are not e2ee.

    @glacier’s response pretty much covers it all, and it’s confirmed in the Whatsapp Faq.

    Sure, they could find out who you are based on someone who added you as contact. But if you don’t have a FB account, or don’t use your real name there, all they’ll know is that you have a WhatsApp account, but won’t see your messages, unless someone reports your messages. Sure, that’s not as great as Signal, but much better than Discord/Slack/Snapchat/etc.

    There’s also the issue of trust. Can we trust Whatsapp when they claim it’s e2ee? There’s no way to verify, but the same can be said for other OSS alternatives; for instance, telegram servers are not open source and the client you download might not be the one you see on GitHub., So there’s no guarantee your private key is not sent to the server at any point.

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    • GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      if you don’t have a FB account, or don’t use your real name there, all they’ll know is that you have a WhatsApp account, but won’t see your messages, unless someone reports your messages

      They don't need your chit-chat to profile you. Metadata profiling is where it's at and that's why that whole e2ee introduction was just a marketing ruse. It's good enough for the NSA, so it's good enough for Meta. And Meta does collect that data even without an account.

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      • Poutinetown@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’s good enough for NSA to catch a terrorist, not necessarily useful enough for FB to produce targeted ads. If one plans to commit terrorism, Whatsapp is definitely not the best platform.

        According to the article you linked: “In most cases, if metadata must be generated and/or used, it should be either 1) minimal or 2) encrypted so that it’s unreadable by the server handling the request(s)”. So most of the important metadata from your files will be encrypted, which make them inaccessible by Whatsapp unless they decrypt it (thus breaking the e2ee promises). Maybe they’ll know the file size or the file name, which you can easily change; what will they do with that?

        So they are pretty much left with IP (if you don’t use VPN) and phone numbers you have contacted (which is already know by Apple/Google, NSA, etc. if you have a phone number and use it for calls).

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