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Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

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Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#91

Hold on. Wasn't Facebook Messenger supposed to be encrypted E2E? EDIT: Ok, from the responses I get I was confused. Maybe Allo? Skype? I'm sure someone else other than Signal and WhatsApp were using Signal's protocol. Just ignore this post.

You are correct, Messenger "Secret Conversations" uses E2E with the Signal protocol[0]

[0]: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/facebook-completely-encrypted-...

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#92

There seems to be a cottage industry around making words more palatable when it comes to tech privacy. "Scans" should be "reads and stores" "What you send to other people" should be "private messages, images, and videos" "What you send to other people" implies that there was no expectation of privacy in the first place, which (while true) I think does not match the 'normal' person's expectations or understanding. New…

Another example of charitable sanitisation: referring to personal data being 'monetized' rather than 'sold'. Information is sold when advertisers can target sets of users based on their personal data.

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#93
So Facebook Messenger has the option of end-to-end encryption of chats when you use "Secret Conversations", which are encrypted using the Signal Protocol [0], [1]

Is there any indication that FB doesn't scan the contents of these messages before encrypting them with your own key and sending them across the wire?

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605... [1]: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/facebook-completely-encrypted-...

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you this then. I clicked your HN profile for clues about what your interests might be, and you mention your public key on keybase.io. For this example (I am writing this before I did this search) I will search Google for keybase.io and copy here one of the top ads. Unfortunately keybase.io and keybase as search terms don't show me any ads. Let me try "public key". Still no ad. (On Google's homepage.) Let m…

I would rather see the cat food. Software products that need advertisement to succeed are either underperforming (because they’ve spent their money on ads instead of devs) or scams.

To be fair, I don't know of a single successful software product that doesn't advertise in some fashion.

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#95
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With email, I don’t explicitly white list people I want to communicate with. With messaging apps, Facebook has a list of people I consider “friends”.

What difference does that make?

Anyone can email me and the only way to prevent spam from unknown senders is by providing a filter.

With messaging, I've already explicitly told Facebook who I want to contact me - my "friends". I've never received a message from a friend claiming to be Nigerian prince or trying to sell me "generic Viagra".

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they didn't scan and detect child porn, there would be articles about how they're letting people get away with sharing child porn on Messenger. It seems there's no way for Facebook to win here, given that people want both complete privacy and also no illicit activity on the platform.

> If they didn't scan and detect child porn, there would be articles about how they're letting people get away with sharing child porn on Messenger. No there wouldn’t be. Do you hear that about iMessage, SMS, email or the numerous other services?

> Do you hear that about...

Yes.

The reason why you don't hear about it is because of all the work already being done to combat it.

How much work have you done in this field?

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#97
post #39

Why is this newsworthy? Did people think Facebook somehow didn't have access to what was being sent across its own platform?

"They would never do that because people would lose trust in them and their profits would drop!"

"I know a guy that works there, and he says they take privacy very seriously!"

"Facebook is too big to make such a stupid decision like looking into your personal communications!"

^ All of these are arguments that I've heard here on HN. I can't even imagine what people on non-tech oriented sites say.

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#98
post #72
post #70

FTA: “For example, on Messenger, when you send a photo, our automated systems scan it using photo matching technology to detect known child exploitation imagery Ah yes, the "Think of the children" [1] argument. This is the favorite argument of censorship [2] lawmakers, dictators and everyone who wants to destroy personal liberties and privacy. They always invoke "think of the children" arguments because you look like…

What do you propose as an alternative? This isn't govt mandated censorship, it's a private company not wanting to become a CP sharing portal.

Don't fool yourself. There's nothing stopping any pedophiles from sending links to private websites where their content is hosted. Saying that they are scanning anything to "think of the children" is simply being naive.

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#99
post #15

Just another reason to avoid Facebook products : Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp ... I think E2E encrypted messaging is the only social solution that makes sense in today's ad tech pervasive tracking world.

WhatsApp is E2E encrypted

You trust that? I do not. Perhaps my tin foil is showing from under my hoodie, but the incentive is to collect data, or else... what?

Re: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App

#100
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, very old news. They also blocked URLs to competitors claiming the links were spam. Even if you legit posted the link, Facebook didn't notify you the message didn't send. It just failed silently.

> They also blocked URLs to competitors claiming the links were spam. Even if you legit posted the link, Facebook didn't notify you the message didn't send. It just failed silently. Any links to more reading on this?

https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-soc...
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