51–60 of 192 posts
Counterpoint: he's a monopolist and scummy person (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) who refuses to stop (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/snapchat-reporte...) from the early days onwards (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169354)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
iMessage is end to end encrypted. Although Apple says it secure and the courts and FBI seem to not be able to get it in, it is still closed source.
iMessage backups in the cloud are subject to warrants. Even if you don't use iCloud backups, can you be sure everyone you communicate with also abstains?
There is no oversight of these monstrosities of any sort. I doubt anyone would have issues with the thesis that Meta would implement anything that might curb their user numbers unless it was mandated.
Why would they? They are beholden to their shareholders first. If it isn't illegal then it isn't illegal, immoral perhaps but that is not illegal, unless it is illegal.
My learned friends are going to have to really get their bowling arms warmed up for this sort of skit. For starters, you need a victim ... err complainant.
It will be so foolish of anyone to think that WhatsApp is a truly e2e encrypted messaging platform.
Why ? You think Meta removed the privacy layers or put backdoors in place ? I mean if that's the suspicion, maybe we should read the terms of service and see if they actually guarantee E2E encryption
It was bought as a power play, consolidation of tech power. Why would I trust them to do the right thing?
Didn't Hacker News feature an article on their home page at some point (10 years ago?) that at that time Facebook misconfigured something and users could observe their data being fed directly to some Israeli intelligence company? That was the day I deleted my FB account and never looked at anything they offer anymore.
There are very, very few apps I really trust. E.g. the only mechanism I trust for communicating passwords securely is GPG, I wouldn’t even use Signal for that.
Given how WhatsApp is the de-facto way to communicate outside of the West and China, these security/data-handling "weaknesses" are most likely a feature, not a bug. An absolute bonanza for the certain intelligence services. Remember, kids: End to end encryption is useless if the "ends" are fully controlled by an (untrustworthy) third party.
> outside of the West you probably mean outside of the USA, it's huge in Europe/UK (which doesn't contradict your main point)
USA is special because it is the (only?) country where iPhone has more users than Android.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
iMessage backups in the cloud are subject to warrants. Even if you don't use iCloud backups, can you be sure everyone you communicate with also abstains?
Aren’t those encrypted with a key that lives on your device only?
I hate Meta as much as the next person, but it feels like "endangering billions of users" is exagerating here. The complaint is pretty much that WhatsApp engineers can access metadata ( NOT the content of the messages). This said, WhatsApp is not open source, so it's impossible for users to verify how the encryption works, so users have to trust that it's properly end-to-end encrypted. If you care about privacy (and…
The metadata of someone's communications can be almost as damning as the content. I would guess that if the FBI could merely have a list of who their suspect contacted over an app, and when, they'd have 90% of what they wanted.