I’m just gonna say, end to end encryption is jack shit when they can just access the content at the source, analyze it with local rules and call sending to meta how often you talk about a certain topic and with whom telemetry
Or for that matter you could just not properly encrypt it
End-to-end encryption is the best possible safeguard against Meta snooping on your data.
This has always been my biggest pet peeve with WhatsApp. Yes, they might encrypt it all and the encryption might be practically unbreakable, but what worries me is what Meta might do with the private encryption keys. Lem me elaborate further.
I’ll start by trying to explain how key-based encryption, the type of encryption WhatsApp uses, work at their core, for those who don’t know (THIS IS GOING TO BE AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION). Imagine you want a friend to send you a message with super sensitive contents. Here’s what you do to guarantee that no one else can read it but you:
- First, you generate two keys, which are pretty much two really big numbers. One will be called the public key and the other one will be the private key.
- Then, you go to the person who wants to send you stuff and say “Hey John, remember that really important message you wanted to send me? Take my public key and make sure you cypher your message using it”.
- Once you receive the message, you decypher it using the private key. Using the private key is the only way you can read this message. You can’t use the public key for it because it won’t work.
This means that, if someone else manages to get the encrypted message, they will need the private key to read what it says, but they don’t have it, only you have it. The only thing they can do keep guessing what that key is until they find what it was and read the message, but that can take up to millions of years, even using supercomputers.
As you can see, this works really well for sending messages without anyone but the sender and the reciever knowing what is being said, and that’s why it’s so used in encrypted message apps…
…but what if Meta has access to the private keys? I mean, what if, after WhatsApp creating the public and private keys for messaging, the private key is retrieved and stored in Meta’s servers, making them able to read all the messages you receive?
Can someone with more experience in the subject say if my concerns are valid?
Easy, don’t use Zuckerbot crap
Not easy when all my friends and family use it
And in other parts of the world where it’s just a standard. I was surprised when I saw WhatsApp numbers on advertisements with the WhatsApp logo. Hard not to be on WhatsApp in those places.
Also my friends and Family, but this is why I don’t use this shit, I can also communicate with them, better still, with a simple call, perhaps with an SMS (yes, it still exists) or directly in person, accompanied with some beers.
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WhatsApp seems to be something only foreigners and drug dealers use in my experience. What’s the appeal?
You know, when you’re one of those foreigners whose peers all exclusively use WhatsApp, be it child or grandparent, that’s a pretty big appeal. To me, you’re the weird foreigner who doesn’t use WhatsApp ;)
Fair enough, I’m just saying locally no one uses it except really sketchy people who get weird looks when they ask if anyone has it. It’s pretty much either Facebook Messenger or Snapchat around these parts.
Facebook Messenger or Snapchat
…that’s somehow worse than WhatsApp.
I never said that? I don’t even know what it looks like because it’s so uncommon here, lol.
‘Foreigners’ to where? The US?
I don’t use WhatsApp at all, but it irks me when ‘foreigner’ is used on the internet as if ‘we’ are all in a single country.
You’re a foreigner to me.
Yes. I am a foreigner to you. I’m saying, people who emigrate here seem to use it. I’m sorry I didn’t type out “people who emigrate here” and used a shorthand term, hopefully someday you can forgive me.
Where is here? You never said where you’re talking about.
It’s okay, you’ll get over not having the answer to where a stranger lives on a thread that’s a week old.
That’s a lost fight, at least in my circle and in my circles’s circles. It was already difficult to move some of them to Signal and Telegram but even then, they kept using Whatsapp.
It should be managed at nation /European Union level, they should forbid this shit.
