Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
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Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#2I also had the same experience in some client projects where we were explicitly told not to use it for anything work related.
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#3Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#4Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.
Unfortunately the agencies in charge of vetting this kind of software work in timespans of 2-3 years (not just Germany in most other countries as well).
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#5Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.
Gov IT departments are a couple of years behind (average) company IT departments which are a couple of years behind what people use.
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#6Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.
The article says: The Düsseldorf newspaper Handelsblatt said Kelber, previously a Social Democrat (SPD) federal parliamentarian, was reacting to complaints from citizens about the use of WhatsApp by unnamed federal authorities.
It seems some „authorities” used it as a citizen communication channel for official contact.
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#7Then provide useful, technically complete, secure alternatives that are vetted by the government. The expectations of your employees are changing, so the technology you provide should change along.
I don't understand why the EU members aren't working on such projects together. For instance, it doesn't make sense for an EU country to develop its own Linux distro (as Germany has tried to do in the past). If anything, there should be an EU-wide Linux distro that is used by all EU members' institutions, including government agencies, local agencies, schools, etc.
It's not just about the development costs and time/R&D spent on that particular variant, but also the fact that training gets much cheaper in the long term if government employees across the EU nations know how to use the same system. Same for any other open source project, including messengers.
France built its own Riot-based end-to-end encrypted messenger, but they should open it up to the whole EU and then the whole EU should contribute to it and used it for its government workers. There should also be severe penalties for any EU member that tries to backdoor it, etc (even if the code is open source, it could still happen as a backdoor could be hidden within "badly written code", too):
https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#8Generally I'm for stronger data protection, but German officials relationship to WhatsApp is a bit silly, I always wonder what their conrete worry or attack scenario is. That a rouge employee at WhatsApp can see your metadata or access your telefone book? That the US government can see your metadata? Criminal and state actors have access to most of that information anyway.
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#9From my experience a lot of people will not hesitate to contact you via WhatsApp even in a professional setting if they can get hold of your phone number. After this happened several times to me I made sure to have a separate phone for business where no messengers or any "social" apps are installed.
The funny side of this behavior is your client messaging you via WhatsApp but forgetting their profile picture shows them drunk emptying a giant beer shoe :D
Re: Germany's data chief tells ministries WhatsApp is a no-go
#10If they discourage people from using something, they should tell people what is the alternative.
I've been user of Signal for years, but with recent changes especially with screen nagging me and everyone else to enter PIN I'm going back to Whatsapp, which was my secondary messenger, but which has most contacts anyway.
What are the other options - Messenger, Telegram, Skype or whatever Google kills this year, which are all not even E2E encrypted by default (let alone colecting metadata)? Anything else has zero users and it's not user friendly.
It's not like there is user friendly completely safe service, after all even Signal now collects and stores your contacts in cloud after forcing you to create PIN nobody asked for, while they still keep asking for phone number and nag you with other prompts instead of adding basic features like pin conversation to top.