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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?

#271

Post by elliekelly »

a1371 wrote: post #266

Whenever you post a link in Whatsapp, the app tries to create a card from the metadata available in the link. The procedure to make the card presumably goes through fb servers and is outside the e2e. Could they be using that? Another hypothesis is that you are taking other steps such as searching for that topic so that you can send something to your wife those extra steps might be enabling tracking.

I often wonder this about unsolicited media text messages (which, for me at least, are almost all political) and whether they might use the iMessage automatic “preview” function to track whether or not a message has been opened/viewed. As far as I’m aware it’s not a feature you can turn off on iOS.

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

#272

Post by Closi »

moralestapia wrote: post #248

(wrt some comments in this thread) Is it so hard to believe that Meta is snooping on WhatsApp conversations? Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data? A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)? Someone from this community, which generally means educated, tech-literate and sen…

From WhatsApp privacy policy:

We limit the information we share with Meta in important ways. For example, we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Meta can see these private messages.

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

#273

Post by Closi »

FreeHugs wrote: post #5

Just because that the messages might be sent end-to-end encrypted from Sue to Joe does not mean Meta cannot read them. Meta has control over the app Sue uses. So they could send them to Meta unencrypted in addition to sending them to Joe in an encrypted fashion. Or they just extract the relevant terms: Sue->Joe: "Hello Joe, I'm so excited! We are going to have a baby! Let's call it Dingbert. You're not the father! Ji…

In principle yes, in practice no, as this is a statement from the WhatsApp website:

> We limit the information we share with Meta in important ways. For example, we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Meta can see these private messages.

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

#274

Post by muzani »

gabelschlager wrote: post #95
traveler01 wrote: post #92

I'm pretty sure even the mics are listening to what we say since for years it's been happening that when I discuss something with my girlfriend ads about it start to show up. We don't even use WhatsApp, didn't search about the said company on Google or Facebook, nothing. We just discuss something about it with our phones on our side and suddently ads start showing up. The fact they are spying on WhatsApp messages isn…

There has been a couple of studies on the topic that observed network traffic and never were able to found anything. So despite the persistence of the rumors, so far this remains a conspiracy theory.

Speech to text isn't difficult to do and within the the capabilities of Meta. I even wrote a basic proof of concept on what it might look like: https://github.com/smuzani/soundrecorder

It's not too hard to transcribe text into a few kb, or summarize them further on the client, and then upload that together with the rest of the data.

I'd be very interested in seeing those studies and whether they match up.

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

#275

Post by netsectoday »

thehappypm wrote: post #270
netsectoday wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

you’d think that a educated group like this would understand that anecdotes are not sufficient evidence for something like this.

This is a message board about tech... comments aren't welcome anymore - we need evidence to participate?

I think it's interesting when a bunch of people chime in and say "Hey, yeah, I had some crazy thing happen to me, I'm in tech and understand how this stuff works, and there's a very small to zero chance this happened through some other parallel construction by the tech company, they just straight up listened to my conversation and showed me an ad".

This is what kicks off a handful of you to go packet sniffing and write up a blog post looking for this behavior. So yes, evidence is welcome but it doesn't seem like we are quite there yet.

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

#276

Post by cvwright »

fold3 wrote: post #101

I had a video call with my mum on signal from her android phone to my macbook. Then I got very specific video recommendation in YouTube about our conversation within the same day. Her android is oppo. Could it be leaking the signal call and then cross match me with the phone numbers to my google account?

More likely something on your end was listening, if you’re the one who got the ad.

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

#277

Post by muzani »

Closi wrote: post #272
moralestapia wrote: post #248

(wrt some comments in this thread) Is it so hard to believe that Meta is snooping on WhatsApp conversations? Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data? A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)? Someone from this community, which generally means educated, tech-literate and sen…

From WhatsApp privacy policy: We limit the information we share with Meta in important ways. For example, we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Meta can see these private messages.

Also WhatsApp privacy policy:

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

====

Popular theory is they can't see or store your messages, but can analyze them on the client and profile you (e.g. interested in brazil nuts)

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

#278

Post by roywiggins »

leobg wrote: post #191
Maro wrote: post #18

Whatsapp FAQ: WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is used when you chat with another person using WhatsApp Messenger. End-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you're communicating with can read or listen to what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. This is because with end-to-end encryption, your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to un…

Can I not train a text classifier on encrypted text? Basically, let the AI figure out what ads get clicked the most for a given string of encrypted 24h window of chat history. Eventually, the AI is going to hit on its “Rosetta Stone”, even without ever formally decrypting the text, much less any human reading it. With millions of conversations happening on WhatsApp, why shouldn’t that be possible? And it’s not even a…

If any algorithm can get even one bit of data about the plaintext then the encryption is broken by definition.

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

#280

Post by lrvick »

Closi wrote: post #272
moralestapia wrote: post #248

(wrt some comments in this thread) Is it so hard to believe that Meta is snooping on WhatsApp conversations? Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data? A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)? Someone from this community, which generally means educated, tech-literate and sen…

From WhatsApp privacy policy: We limit the information we share with Meta in important ways. For example, we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Meta can see these private messages.

Meta controls the proprietary Whatsapp client software that decrypts your messages and they can have that decrypt and scan the messages for them and send back metrics and how often different words are used.

They can of course also have their app de-crypt and re-encrypt the messages to the key of a requesting third party like police or hired reviewers if certain keywords are used.

Authorities could also have Google or Apple ship a signed tampered Whatsapp binary to any user or group of users, like protestors, that uses a custom seeded random number generator so they can predict all encryption keys generated and no one else, including Meta, will know.

The variant of end to end encryption where third parties control the proprietary software on both ends, is called marketing.

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