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

Don't. People are way too tolerant of serial liars, psychopaths and rapacious corporations.

Let me tell you about another third party that is not mentioned here. The telecom operator. Once, in 2019, I was reinstalling WhatsApp on my smartphone. I checked the Internet traffic records (outbound) with curiosity. This led me to finding out that my phone was reaching out to *whatsapp.com (Meta's servers) and Belgacom (Belgium's telephony provider). So, my phone's data was being routed through the parent company's devices and some other third party services like a national telecom company. I don't if it's still the case nowadays, but since that day, I have more worries about their encryption and data relay practices.

for a lot of people, no

> Meta, a company of unprecedented size that was built over monetizing your private data?

one of many companies, however "meta" does have the advantage that you can opt out of them, mostly.

> A company who's been caught in plenty of scandals (like Cambridge Analytic) about this exact sort of thing (violating their users' privacy)?

CA is interesting as it started out as an academic study, which was consented fully. CA then went on to scrape people's public profiles, which often included likes, friends, etc. This combined with other opensource information allowed them to claim to have good profiles of lots of people, the PR was strong. Should FB have had such an open graph? probably not. Should they have taken the rap for everything evil on the internet since 2016? no. There are other actors who are much more predatory who we should really be questioning.

> Are you Meta employees?

I think you place far to much faith into a company that is clearly floundering. Its not like it has a master plan to invade your entire life. Its reached it's peak and has not managed to find a new product, and is slowly fading.

However, as we all think we are engineers, we should really design a test! but first we need to be mindful of how people are tracked:

1) phone ID. If you are on android, your phone is riddled with markers. Apple, supposedly they are hidden, but I don't believe that they don't leak

2) account, and account is your UUID that tracks what you like.

3) your IP. if you have IPv6, perhaps you are quite easy to track. even on V4 your home IP changes irregularly and can be combined with any of the above to work out that you are the same household.

4) your browser fingerprint. (be that cookies, or some other method)

5) your social graph

method:

1) buy two new phones.

2) do not register them with wifi

3) create all new accounts for tiktock, gmail, instgram etc.

4) never log into anything you've created previously, or the fresh accounts on old devices.

5) message each other about something. However you need to source your ideas from something offline, like a book from a thrift store or the like. maybe an old magazine. open a page, pick the first thing your finger lands on. this will eliminate the "I heard about x" or "i'm in the mood for y"

report back.

In a perfect world sure Facebook has the power and money to do a lot of things. So do the other megacorps. They don’t do them, and you’re correct it is the misalignment of incentives to due so.

But Facebook doesn’t control what keyboard you use on your phone and if the keyboard is sending every message you type somewhere, they can’t do anything about that and they aren’t lying that they can’t read your messages.

Whether or not you believe that they do in fact harvest the message data is up to you. But certainly people using keyboards that harvest data is very plausible to me as a vector for this stuff.