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Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

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Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#21

Post by nso »

rreyes1979 wrote: post #12
napolux wrote: post #3

IANAL of course, but you should read the ToS carefully and you will probably find something that allows them to read your messages anyway. e2e encryption doesn't forbid to read the messages as you type or read them or read a screenshot of the screen or whatever they can do inside an app :P They were caught activating your camera by "error" a while ago https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/12/facebook-bug-camera-bac... As…

We are seeing the same thing. More so, my wife sent me a picture of my daughter working on a puzzle. Less than 24 hours later, her Instagram was showing ads for a store that was selling the same type of puzzle as the one my daughter was playing with. So it's not just terms but images too.

Was the picture taken with whatsapp, or with the camera app? Do you have google photos installed? I GP classifies images, maybe also for advertisement?

Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#22

Post by napolux »

lifeinthevoid wrote: post #16

Can someone working on WhatsApp weigh in on this or are there very restrictive NDA's? I would expect it's an interpretation of the TOS, so WhatsApp should be able to communicate if this is a possibility or not.

guess nobody from meta could comment on this without a legal writing the answer for them

Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#25

Post by SamBam »

shafyy wrote: post #4

Could it just be confirmation bias? Or could it be that the correlation is the other way around: You see something online, decide to pick that as your topic with your partner (unconciously) and the ads show up because of the initial location you have seen the topic.

The best way to solve this would be to pick three topics ahead of time. If you're worried about the phone's microphone, do so by pen and paper.

Then randomly select one of those three topics to discuss on WhatsApp.

Finally, keep an objective eye out for ads about all three topics. Ideally, log every single ad you see.

Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#26

Post by muzani »

WhatsApp Privacy Policy:

How We Work With Other Meta Companies

As part of the Meta Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information (see here) with, the other Meta Companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings, including the Meta Company Products. This includes:

...

- improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products; and

Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#28

Post by theginger »

rreyes1979 wrote: post #14
arnath wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn’t Gboard send your typing data to Google?

But this is Instagram and WhatsApp. Are they sharing data about our conversations openly?

Who is they? Google or meta?

Google are definitely collecting data from gboard.

That may not be directly shared with meta but is likely to get indirectly shared through overlapping advertising identifiers. They won't be openly sharing your text, but they will be scanning to and flagging you as having interests in something in your text or something related to what you said, then sharing that with advertisers.

Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?

#29

Post by elondaits »

Maro wrote: post #17

Some options: 1. Nobody is reading your WA messages, the same topics can be learned from your browsing activity or other msgs, eg. by reading your sms texts. 2. Meta is reading your messages directly in-transit, server-side. 3. Meta is not reading your messages server-side, but the Meta apps extract keywords from your conversations and request relevant ads from the ad servers. 4. Another non-Meta app is doing the abo…

Another option would be that META created a small model that could be run client-side and picked the right selection of ads to show elsewhere without even exfiltrating keywords.
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