This is just https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-listening-smartphone-m... in a different medium.
Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
281–290 of 473 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#282Just 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.
That statement was worded carefully
They are saying they dont store or forward your message text, not that your phone doesnt send them topics of interest
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The screen was off when the event happened... 1) Does your iPhone still record audio when the screen is off? 2) Can you see the audio indicator when the screen is off? 3) If a background app starts then stops recording audio while the screen is off, would you have an indicator that it recorded audio?
Have you tried looking at the screen while using the Facebook app? Also, I feel like the goal posts are moving quite fast in one direction.
Goal posts? Is this a competition?
The phone was sitting between two people having a conversation, one of them "swiped it open" meaning it was off to begin with, then was immediately displayed an ad for that conversation, and upon hearing this the tech-savvy person in the house understood what happened, confirmed it with the mic access to facebook in the settings, and then disabled the behavior.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#284How are you coordinating the topics? Maybe by voice within earshot of a phone with Meta apps?
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#285As someone who has actually worked on end to end encryption at Meta, I can tell you I am not aware of anything where the company reads your WhatsApp messages - either in transit or device. The company takes fairly serious measures to ensure it cannot even accidentally infer such contents. I don't know what is happening in this specific case. Perhaps the ads came from some other similar search queries. Perhaps they ca…
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Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
As creepy as this is whenever it happens, I remain convinced it’s observation bias. Because of how often it doesn’t happen. Quoth Richard Feynman: > “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” You were gonna see ads…
I love the Feynman reference. Thank you. And this may be right. However, I also am reminded of Nassim Taleb's Fat Tony, who when asked 'what are the odds of flipping a coin heads 10 times in a row?' responds with 'fuggehdabowdit. it's a hustle.' There's a scientific response, which can be very naive in some ways, and there's the Fat Tony street analysis. As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter.
As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter.
Definitely a good perspective to keep in mind. But at Facebook scale, if a billion people flip an actually fair coin 10 times, around a million of them will get 10 heads. It would be understandable for those people to conclude that the coin is biased, but they'd be wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#287(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.
It's possible that the client blindly fetches a mapping from keyword to ads, saw the keyword client-side, then requested the ad.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In general I agree, but I think when you are being explicitly asked for a "source" in response to an allegation that it is settled that FB has been "caught recording people," I would prefer to not have anecdotes in reply.
Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#289Whatsapp 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…
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Re: Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?
#290(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.
> WhatsApp privacy policy
Facebook has a deep culture of pathological lying. They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and to the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3].
Each of those lies are more substantial than lying in a privacy policy.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/182_3109_fa...
[2] https://euobserver.com/digital/137953
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/the-oversight-board-wants-...