81–90 of 555 posts
This is common knowledge. You can't send a picture of winnie the pooh without it being scanned first and deleted over the wire before being received. People don't use WeChat to organise dissent against the government or for any kind of malicious or illegal activity. The intention is for well meaning folk to communicate and do business online.
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AFAIR Whatsapp does send a copy of your messages to facebook if the messages flag the apps internal 'sounds-like-criminal-activity' scanner.
Do you have a reference for this please? All I can find is this "false alarm": https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backd...
They own stakes in many american media companies and movie production houses. They use this influence to also change our Media and push pro-Chinese propaganda to the American public.
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I don't trust the privacy of any of those services, but there is a huge difference between "the government can subpoena information, or do targeted sniffing if you dont encrypt anything" and "we have a cron job set up that send everything directly to a government server for the express purpose of suppressing speech" To be clear, those services are lame for being as untrustworthy as I believe they are, but let's not e…
Sniffing by the US government isn't that targeted. And the US does harass people who say stuff they don't like, and has a long history of doing this. Were just not executing/jailing that many of them right now.
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There are degrees of security between "I personally built it from source using a compiler I personally built from source" and "Xi Jinping is CC'ed a plaintext copy of every message". The allegation here is that WeChat is basically the latter. No one makes any remotely similar claim about iMessage or WhatsApp.
You forgot "I personally built it from source using a compiler I personally built from source with a micro-compiler that I handcoded in assembly on a computer that I assembled from transistors myself."
Clearly the only solution is to forage your own silicon for artisanal fabrication of your own chips.
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Does Facebook run a team of secret police that can put a bag over your head and have you disappeared?
given that Apple has a secret police[0] group that was exposed during a previous iPhone leak, I don't know if the presupposition that Facebook has something similar is that outrageous. [0]: https://gizmodo.com/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-down-leaks...
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This narrative of false equivalency is dangerous, IMO. WeChat has been proven to be a heavily monitored and censored network. Whatever security failings iMessage and WhatsApp have, they pale in comparison to what's in place for WeChat.
I think the assumption behind your claim of false equivalency is exactly what the parent comment wanted to discuss. You say the security failings of iMessage and WhatsApp pale in comparison to WeChat; I agree with parent comment and ask - in light of PRISM etc. - on what grounds can you say we should not be just as suspicious?
I also, separately, think that in aggregate Apple has incentives to make iMessage secure. While Tencent has incentives to share WeChat data with CCP.
These are among many reasons why the comparison was false equivalence. The world is not just black and white “secure vs not secure.”
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This narrative of false equivalency is dangerous, IMO. WeChat has been proven to be a heavily monitored and censored network. Whatever security failings iMessage and WhatsApp have, they pale in comparison to what's in place for WeChat.
The false equivalency also begs a deeper moral analysis. Let's assume the US government has as complete access to iMessage and WhatsApp as the CCP does to WeChat. The story doesn't end there, since you have to examine the nature of the entities that have access to your information. Would I prefer that access be held by the US Government, which for all its faults is extremely engaged with and integrated into the globa…
What's the use case?