Live data from Hacker News

“How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

whatsapp.com

291–300 of 319 posts

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#291
post #64
post #11

It's kind of pointless, Facebook owns Whatsapp so they have all that info anyway. 'The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.'

Exactly. Moreover, a look at the permissions required by Facebook app would reveal how much information it collects about you: Device & app history retrieve running apps Identity find accounts on the device add or remove accounts read your own contact card Calendar read calendar events plus confidential information add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge Contacts find accounts…

Anybody know which of these apply to the iOS ecosystem?

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random evil thought: could you sell your Facebook account to hackers? You've built up a multi-year reputation as a "known good" account; that'd be incredibly valuable to someone trying to generate cross-correlations between your interests and their product. After all, the whole reason Facebook is worth $300B is because they have all this data on their users; since it's your data to begin with, shouldn't you be able m…

It could sour your relationships with actual friends. But if you're ok with them being deceptively advertised to, maybe they weren't such close friends to begin with...

Unfriend the ones you care about a few weeks beforehand.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#293
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XMPP ecosystem has federation, security and almost every client can talk to almost every server. If Moxie Marlinspike claims that interoperability does not work well in the context of instant messaging, I see this as him trying to manipulate the users so they do not judge him for his behaviour.

The XMPP ecosystem doesn't have security anywhere comparable to what we're talking about (well-implemented, end-to-end, forward-secure, multi-device messaging).

>multi-device messaging

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that Signal supports this feature

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#294
post #273
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is also under marketing surveillance, unless you refuse to correspond with anyone using gmail. I've known only one person willing to go to those lengths to make a point.

If you have a good alternative email I'd be down for that at least. Hosting your own turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

Make that surprisingly easy. Been doing it for more than a decade now, just on my house ADSL connection. It helps that a friend has agreed to host a backup MX.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't use these tools if you value privacy" is not that far off from "If you have nothing to hide, why are you afraid of surveillance?" An observed life is not a free life. Many people have to use social media to communicate with family, work associates, etc... In many cases, facebook messaging has replaced methods of communication that did not rely on the content or metadata of messages for profit. All that really…

That's completely wrong. There is not, and has never been, an inalienable right to use somebody else's property (aka Facebook's network) to communicate. You are not entitled to coerce Facebook into building their product to work the way you want. On the contrary, it's Facebook's right, as the owner and creator of their platform and network, to handle all of the network traffic that you are voluntarily sending them ho…

By your argument, it is the right of Fedex/UPS/whatever to handle all of the parcels that you voluntarily hand over to them in whatever manner they want.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#296
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XMPP ecosystem doesn't have security anywhere comparable to what we're talking about (well-implemented, end-to-end, forward-secure, multi-device messaging).

>multi-device messaging Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that Signal supports this feature

It does, but it's beta and Android only: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#298
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant with GPLv3 is "and they are even willing to grant any patent rights to the general public". I don't know if they hold patents on it, but if they either don't, or are willing to license them freely, then you can implement the protocol from the public documentation of it.

That's not true. The patents grant in GPLv3 or other licenses (like APL) only holds if you're actually using that project in your work. So either you fork the GPLv3 project, and comply with a compatible license, or you don't have a patents grant. This is basically why Google could be sued by Oracle, because Dalvik and their class library based on Apache Harmony were not a fork of OpenJDK. Of course I cannot speak for…

Sorry, I am being unclear. I don't mean that GPLv3 gives you a patent grant for all implementations, yes. I mean that the willingness to license code under GPLv3 means that there's an upper bound on how much Open Whisper Systems cares about licensing the protocol for money.

Which brings me back to the original question—why do we think that OWS's pushing of Signal Protocol is about money? Yes, I expect that for Allo they got paid by Google to write and maintain some code. But I don't think that their general claim "Signal Protocol is good crypto for everyone solving this problem" is motivated by money, because so many people solving this problem could use the GPLv3 version.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, of course, is who builds/maintains this, how do they get paid, and how do you pay the server fees.

The app would run on the user's local PC or phone, and it would access data directly from their mailbox (and create a local DB from that data). So no backend server to worry about.

Without a third-party managing associations, how do you maintain that "friendship" is consensual? In other words, how do you prevent "I have your email address" from meaning "you're my friend now."

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we'll invite our users to donate and add non-essential paid options to break even. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram. - https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...

Who funds their "crack our encryption" contest[1]? I imagine also the same pot? [1] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest

Yeah, I think the "pot" might just be Pavel's bank account. He also recently offered to fund $1 million of grants: https://telegram.org/blog/botprize. I assume he announced the Crypto Contest and hoped/assumed nobody would win.
Post reply on HN