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“Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

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Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#71

Post by chronid »

apozem wrote: post #51
doublepg23 wrote: post #49

Can someone fill me in on why people are upset Facbook will be consolidating DMs/PMs accross services - using E2E ? I've went other the past news releases, it seems to be a good thing to me.

"They will make money by tracking your relationships and social groups. They will make that information easily accessible to law enforcement. They will build the largest surveillance system ever conceived and will sell it under the banner of consumer encryption."

They probably can already do everything you say, eg: cross reference and internally "trade" (meta)data between facebook, instagram and whatsapp backends and deliver that to law enforcement. I'm pretty sure their ability to do analytics is advanced enough (though even technical people sometimes really overestimate how "good" those big companies are at it).

At least at that point they will not have the contents of your messages. Which now they do (with the exception of whatsapp).

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#72

Post by chronid »

xivxix wrote: post #52

This article specifically talks about sex workers using whatsapp and the fact that because of meta data sharing, IF a warrant comes from the government to find users associated with a certain group (such as sex workers groups) on Facebook, it indirectly brings whatsapp users into that group as well through indirect means. Interesting issue yet so many "if"s. The reality is that Facebook needs to make money from whats…

The big issue I have with this is that facebook can already do this, IF a warrant comes from the government.

The issue about being careful about using those metadata for friends/"you could know" (which was always terrible for me) and related functionality is legit though. They should give the user the option of opting out (ex: I don't want you to show my FB profile to people I only have in whatsapp/instagram). Even better, they should allow for opting in and opt out everyone by default.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#73

Post by chronid »

bad_user wrote: post #29
mondo9000 wrote: post #19

The Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft. Doesn't it feel weird that there used to be positive facebook stories, but now its all negative 24/7?

To be honest I can't remember a time when the stories on Facebook were good. I can remember such a time for Google. I can even remember such a time for Microsoft, back when people stayed in line for Windows 95. I was 13 back then and got my first computer. Sure, investors were pleased with Facebook's rapid growth and people liked it because its UI didn't suck like MySpace. But Facebook has always been morally bankrup…

In 2008 and 2012 FB got praised for being the platform that Obama used to win the elections - I remember multiple articles about it (and someone from the Obama campaign later admitted that they did the same thing that got the CA scandal started). In that period of time there were also multiple newspapers writing that "privacy is dead, and it's a good thing". There was not a lot of discussion about privacy when they bought whatsapp and instagram too, IIRC.

Frankly newspapers really changed idea only after Trump won the elections.

I find somewhat fun that some of the recent news about facebook being evil actually talk a lot about that period (ex: the recent news about the "friendly fraud" class action) and some are the consequences of the (naive, as we a lot of us were at the time - me included!) choices facebook made back them (wanting to be a platform, without really understanding what it meant) before pivoting to the current model (which is AFAIK far more similar to google's).

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#74

Post by nobody271 »

code_duck wrote: post #68
nobody271 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steganography+encryption has a number of use cases. The one I think is most interesting is being able to store encrypted data locally with ease. Right now if I want to encrypt some text I have a number of options. I can encrypt the hard drive. I can encrypt a text file to a binary encrypted file. I can encrypt a text file to a text file with something like pgp. But none of those are what I would call user friendly. B…

Can you elaborate on the logic of why saving encrypted text to an image file is more user-friendly than saving it to a text file? Why would that make people more comfortable?

Because people are more comfortable dealing with image files than .enc files or whatever extension one might use. Plus you dont just have to encode text. You can encode any file type. Look, I don't know what this is to the various participants in this thread but to me it's been really sad. I feel like I'm arguing politics. I don't think I've said anything unduly disrespectful or even incorrect yet I've been arguing about this with people who apparently think they know better but consistently get basic facts wrong or appear to be disingenuous to help win a debate. I'm not here to connect every dot for you. You're not holding my ideas up to the light of truth or whatever you think you may be doing. I really regret logging on to hackernews today.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#75

Post by emanuensis »

eitland wrote: post #25
mondo9000 wrote: post #19

The Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft. Doesn't it feel weird that there used to be positive facebook stories, but now its all negative 24/7?

> The Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft. The fight against old Microsoft is a win-win success story (for now, I'm keeping an eye on all big players and so should everyone else.) Microsoft is nicer and I think more profitable than ever. They don't call our code or favourite OS cancer anymore but actively support us. My understanding is even a lot of MS…

>...come up with a similar stupid name for them...

Farcebook? Been guilty of that one for 8 years. Never had an account, so the label is all hearsay ... but what i kept hearing made me afraid to become a Farce of myself ... so i said to myself "stay away". Hard enough to be self-effacing.

i do still hope we will find a way to communicate easily with relevant others without doing violence to our communication methods for the sake of (what is essentially) a random nudnick's business plan and profit model.

Farcebook likes to go around and break as many things as fast as possible. Before them we had serious people and thought oriented to finding compatible methods. They still exist, but all the oxygen in the room is depleted by Farcebook.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#76

Post by bassman9000 »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #56
bassman9000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metadata + Countries where Rule Of Law doesn't apply + "Law" Enforcement requests E.g. Middle East countries

You get what E2E encryption is, right?

You get what metadata is, right?

That FB doesn't get to snoop what you're saying doesn't prevent them from knowing who you are saying it too. They still control the app.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#77

Post by pilsetnieks »

nobody271 wrote: post #59
pilsetnieks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can pass through any channel that accepts images No. Any online service worth its salt is going to reencode images to serve proper sizes and maybe do other processing. Along the way stuff like EXIF data and other worthless (for displaying the image) chuff will get stripped from the image. Alternatively, if you mean not somehow embedding in the file but encoding in the actual pixels of the image, that data will get…

> No. Yes. Any algorithm designed to be resilient to common processing steps will pass this test with flying colors. Also, EXIF data is not used in steganography, by definition.

Hence why I mentioned that if you encode the data in the actual image (the part that's guaranteed to survive processing,) you cannot do it with very fine elements, like subtly shifting the colors of individual pixels or the like, because an average Facebook JPEG algorithm, for example, will just destroy that. You need to use data points that could survive heavy JPEG artifacting, and that means very few data points per image, and low bandwidth.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#78

Post by gbrown »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #32
nobody271 wrote: post #17

Facebook encrypted messaging! What's next, military intelligence? How about a vegan big-mac? Maybe a quality automobile by GM? I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I'm surprised it isn't already widely used. Let's see: - easy to recognize but hard to detect - can pass through any channel that accepts images - massive storage capac…

Burger King has a veggie Big Mac. https://www.bk.com/menu-item/veggie-burger Steganography has a bad connotation because it's heavily used in the pedophilia realm which would limit it's uptake, somewhat like torrents. Perfectly valid and useful tech that gets used by a few but not by most. I think Telegram, even with it's flaws, is the closest I've come to an easy to use encrypted messaging app that I can get my moth…

Is it? I associate steganography with espionage and consumer printer identification. It's not convenient or practical for most things, but I don't think it has the dark reputation you suggest.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#79

Post by arminiusreturns »

Mirioron wrote: post #8
riazrizvi wrote: post #4

Surveillance on the general public is bought by employers/businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA/FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom. The USA has long a…

The problem with the FBI/NSA mining their communication "for criminal activity" is that they probably don't do it exclusively for that. After Snowden we found out that sometimes NSA employees would use this snooping to stalk people they wanted to be in a relationship with, spy on their neighbors and other such unsavory things.

The other angle, besides just personal abuse (Ala loversgate), that far too many people fail to consider is this:

If the executive branch has such ubiquitous surveillance powers, given their history of manual blackmail and compromise operations, they are highly likely to seek to expand those blackmail style ops to a level heretofor impossible, essentially removing some of the last vestiges of the already under attack principle of seperation of powers and the checks and balances system which is a foundational part of the intended American political structure.

Re: “Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

#80

Post by giancarlostoro »

ams6110 wrote: post #21
nobody271 wrote: post #17

Facebook encrypted messaging! What's next, military intelligence? How about a vegan big-mac? Maybe a quality automobile by GM? I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I'm surprised it isn't already widely used. Let's see: - easy to recognize but hard to detect - can pass through any channel that accepts images - massive storage capac…

Why not just post ASCII armored gpg messages on pastebin?

If you're going to go that route using Pidgin with OTR would make more sense.
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