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Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#171

Post by jeltz »

saurik wrote: post #159
jeltz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A possibility that I can see is simply that they want to add a bot API which is just a simple rest API and not E2E encrypted. And if they remove the E2EE that means FB will be able to read all messages for businesses using their bot API. Correct me if I am wrong but my understanding is that to run a WhatsApp bot you currently basically need to run a version of the whole app. No idea if my theory is correct but if it…

This was pretty explicitly explained by their representatives when this was all blowing up... and they actually DO provide the "library" version, it is just enough of an operations challenge for most businesses that they clearly got a lot of demand for a hosted solution tied to pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26801…

How is using a library an operations challenge? Especially in the era of package managers like npm and maven. This seems to me like FB is incompetent and cannot write a good library for bot use.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#172

Post by jimkleiber »

throwawayboise wrote: post #168
jimkleiber wrote: post #145

I think the question is asking one thing and asserting another: - "have you accepted the TOS?" as the question - "the TOS gives FB access to (all) your WhatsApp data" as the assertion My questions: do you believe that this new TOS gives FB access to my WhatsApp data? If so, to which of my data? All of it? I personally don't believe this TOS gives FB access to all of the communication data I have on WhatsApp, and thus…

Why does anyone believe that FB is not trawling the data anyway? Is there some technical barrier preventing it?

then if we assume they were trawling it anyway (that they're lying about end-to-end encryption), why would this TOS change matter?

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#173

Post by [deleted] »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #157
tomerv wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "virtue signal about virtue signalling"? If you don't need Whatsapp to communicate with your friends/family/colleagues then good for you. In my social circles Whatsapp is a must. Refusing to use it is almost like refusing to have a cellular phone, which is too high a price for me to pay.

> What is "virtue signal about virtue signalling"? It's the jujitsu you did at the beginning of your first post. "People who chose the opposite of my choice are just here to brag about that and show us how concerned they are with big tech and privacy. I on the other hand have the stones to admit that I took the path of least resistance for convenience and there are many others like me that did the same that are just…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#174

Post by inDigiNeous »

No, removed WhatsApp and all Facebook apps from my phone since then. Using Telegram and Signal instead. Don't want them spying on my phone or my data, at least when using through a browser they can't get so much data.

I can use Facebook and Instagram via the browser if needed, although I have not logged into fb from my phone since I updated my phone, just to keep it exclusive to my desktop.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#175

Post by DeathMetal3000 »

sgt wrote: post #71

Honestly, I saw some dialog and clicked Accept, despite not reading it. I don't use WhatsApp for anything critical. I use iMessage for that and I have a lot of trust in Apple to do the right thing.

iMessage could be great except it falls back to SMS when the other phone is Android or there is no data network available. Also you lose the privacy once your messages are backed up to iCloud.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#176

Post by rescbr »

jeltz wrote: post #171
saurik wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pretty explicitly explained by their representatives when this was all blowing up... and they actually DO provide the "library" version, it is just enough of an operations challenge for most businesses that they clearly got a lot of demand for a hosted solution tied to pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26801…

How is using a library an operations challenge? Especially in the era of package managers like npm and maven. This seems to me like FB is incompetent and cannot write a good library for bot use.

It’s not a library. It’s a distributed multi-node WhatsApp client that handles the proprietary parts and interacts with your chatbot application using webhooks/REST APIs.

Not trivial to setup and operate, as it was designed for high-throughput scenarios. It’s very understandable that smaller customers wouldn’t want to handle that little monster.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#177

Post by viccuad »

meribold wrote: post #133
glitchcrab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would WhatsApp ever have this functionality? It would do serious damage to the walled garden which they've so successfully built.

Conversely, it wouldn’t really make sense for Signal to interoperate with apps that don’t offer the same level of privacy.

Like Matrix, then.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#178

Post by viccuad »

dylan604 wrote: post #146
meribold wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, it wouldn’t really make sense for Signal to interoperate with apps that don’t offer the same level of privacy.

Even with E2E, if both platforms offered the same standarized encryption, would this allow for cross-platform messaging? Of course, some mechanism for exchanging of public keys would be needed as well.

The Axolotl ratchet is the basis of both current Signal and WhatsApp. The standarized layer you are looking for is Matrix, which uses the same encryption approach.

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#179

Post by tut-urut-utut »

meribold wrote: post #154
dylan604 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with E2E, if both platforms offered the same standarized encryption, would this allow for cross-platform messaging? Of course, some mechanism for exchanging of public keys would be needed as well.

I guess not since both platforms use centralized protocols. With the Signal client being FOSS [1] and WhatsApp being proprietary, I also think that me using Signal to message someone on WhatsApp would still downgrade my privacy because I don’t know what the WhatsApp client is really doing with my message. [1] In reality I don’t know that the Signal app on my phone is actually built from the publicly available code.

Why not build yourself from source?

Re: Ask HN: Have you accepted the TOS that give FB access to your WhatsApp data?

#180

Post by robjan »

fsflover wrote: post #91
robjan wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accepted it because it's more convenient than dismissing the popup every time I want to send someone a message.

Which means you accepted it because you do not care about your privacy or unethical behavior of Facebook.

That is your assumption
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