Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages? • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by brigandish » Thu, Sep 29, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #228

brigandish wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you view the apartment with…? - the agent present - you both had smartphones on you - they both had bluetooth data enabled - they are both signed into location services - you'd added the agent to your contacts or they add you to theirs - you took pictures (and didn't strip the EXIF data) - you exchanged emails with the agent via gmail - you rang each other via a VOIP service - you used a map app to find the place…

The agent is a friend so I had in my contact list for years. We exchange listings to apartments to view so absolutely they know I'm looking at apartments and all that stuff. Getting adverts for apartments is fine because I know I searched and browsed sites etc. The issue is for 2 weeks I looked at apartments. Got some adverts for AirBnb, other property sites, etc. The particular apartment I looked at, I viewed it, wa…

That's certainly fishy but it doesn't rule out other methods that rely on statistics. For example, how many other people have visited that apartment and within a few hours searched for window grills and latches? Perhaps all of them.

Still, use Signal is the answer. The more people that use it, the more people will use it and the less we'll have to worry about whether messaging apps owned by ad companies are e2e.

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

#472

Post by codethief » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #460

codethief wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so Telegram, which is known for being able to read all your texts, is worse than WhatsApp where people are speculating that it might read your texts? Not that I trust WhatsApp (I use Signal) but that's an odd comparison.

you are also speculating that Telegram read our messages, in transit. For sure, unlike WhatsApp, the Telegram client is FOSS (and you can download it from FDroid).

I'm not speculating at all and I think you're misunderstanding the point I'm trying to make.

First of all, transport security (server-client encryption as you called it) like TLS is irrelevant for this discussion. All major platforms on the internet employ transport security these days, so this is a given.

The point I'm trying to make is that Telegram does not offer E2E encryption by default: (Non-"secret") Messages on Telegram pass through Telegram's servers unencrypted and are also stored there unencrypted, meaning that Telegram has access to all your messages. This is not speculation – Telegram openly admits to this in their FAQ:

https://telegram.org/faq?setln=ru#q-do-i-need-to-trust-teleg...

(See also the link contained therein.)

Meanwhile, the speculations in the present HN discussions aside, WhatsApp does provide E2E encryption, so – from this POV – is orders of magnitude more secure.

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

#473

Post by Handytinge » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #106

It's a shame this kind of thing is so hard to prove, otherwise it would be all over the media. People will write it off as 'coincidence'. "Perhaps you looked for or discussed it elsewhere". What happened with Skype before was that Microsoft would ping any links from their servers, so it was really easy to prove it by generating a new web server, publishing it nowhere and then mentioning it in a chat. This caused some…

It's incredibly easy to prove. You could prove it by setting up clean devices.

Plenty of people have attempted to prove it, and gone radio silent after trying.

There are billions of users, and tens of millions of them are technical, and tens of thousands of them work for these companies. Yet there's 0 evidence of this ever actually happening. Does this not seem strange to you?