this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Yes, the "delivering" part would be E2EE. Do we really know the afterwards if they can read their users' messages? They probably can.
Whatsapp CANNOT read messages when e2ee is enabled, this client-side snooping was discussed when the protocol was first implemented. Whatsapp collects a ton of metadata and social graph info, but not message content.
Well you type messages in in plain text and they decrypt it to show you the messages at the other end. So they can do the nefarious processing on the client side and send back results to the mother ship. E2EE is only good when you trust the two ends, but with WhatsApp and Messenger you shouldn't trust the ends.
At the end of the day, you’ve got to trust someone. I’m 200% convinced meta mines the social graph, of course they do, and provide access to law enforcement with a pro forma request. But I’m also 199% sure they don’t actually read your messages once unencrypted, reencrypts them and sends them as hidden payloads or does something else with it. The damage, should it be discovered, would be untold.
And while I don’t trust Meta on a lot of things, I know enough people there to realise that if they did that it would leak.
It wouldn't matter to them really. Just look at how many people have gmail accounts.
They don't even have to send the whole messages back to base. They could be categorizing your messages in to themes and sending that back to base as small category flags. Use that to build a profile on you and use those for advertising to you.
You mention something on the theme of 'broken boiler' in a message, that gets analyzed on the client in to a category of 'interest in heating / boiler repair', plus some adjacent categories based on your demographic. The categorization gets sent back and the next website you visit has an ad for British Gas boiler repair.
Yes but it’s not like people wouldn’t observe the traffic, even if encrypted.
Sure, but any messaging app (including Signal) could have these backdoors in place. Heck, there's even vectors for unrelated apps on your phone to read this data once unencrypted.
That's actually true. We don't know the real-time server code of Signal. Though other apps cannot read what's written inside Signal, that's the good part. I prefer private server + Matrix but Signal is the easiest for regular people.
Signal clients are open-source.
Signal is only officially distributed through Google Play, so their APK isn't reproducible, and I believe it still contains binary blobs.
You can download Signal APK directly from their website.