Anyone trusting Facebook to follow basic human decency and, yes, laws, is a fool.
US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
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Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#42I mean at the very least if their clients can read it then they can at least read it through their clients, right? And if their clients can read it’ll be because of some private key stored on the client device that they must be able to access, so they could always get that. And this is just assuming that they’ve been transparent about how it’s built, they could just have backdoors on their end.
they can also just .. brute force passwords. the pin to encrypt fb messenger chat is 6 digits for example.
but that is a pin and can be rate limited / denied, not a cryptograhpic key that can be used to brute force and compare hash generations (?)
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#43What even are these low effort, uninformed conspiratorial comments saturating the comment section?
Sure, Meta can obviously read encrypted messages in certain scenarios:
- you report a chat (you're just uploading the plaintext)
- you turn on their AI bot (inference runs on their GPUs)
Otherwise they cannot read anything. The app uses the same encryption protocol as Signal and it's been extensively reverse engineered. Hell, they worked with Moxie's team to get this done (https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/).
The burden of proof is on anyone that claims Meta bypassing encryption is "obviously the case."
I am really tired of HN devolving into angry uninformed hot takes and quips.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
they can also just .. brute force passwords. the pin to encrypt fb messenger chat is 6 digits for example.
but that is a pin and can be rate limited / denied, not a cryptograhpic key that can be used to brute force and compare hash generations (?)
They likely wouldn’t rate limit themselves, rate limiting only applies when you access through their cute little enter your pin UI.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#45Who do they expect to fall for the claims that a Facebook owned messenger couldn't read your "encrypted" messages? It's truly funny. Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.
> Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors
Wonder what large scale provider outside USA won’t do that?
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#46If your personal threat model at this point is not literally:
“everything I ever do can be used against me in court”
…then you are not up-to-date with the latest state of society
Privacy is the most relevant when you are in a position where that information is the difference between your life or your death
The average person going through their average day breaks dozens of laws because the world is a Kafkaesque surveillance capitalist society.
The amount of information that exists about there average consumer is so unbelievably godly such that any litigator could make an argument against nearly any human on the planet that they are in violation of something if there is enough pressure
If you think you’re safe in this society because you “don’t do anything wrong“ then you’re compromised and don’t even realize it
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#47if anybody believes that Facebook would allow people to send a totally encrypted message to somebody, they're out of their mind. they're pretty much in bed with law enforcement at this point. I mean I don't know how many people have been killed in Saudi Arabia this year for writing Facebook messages to each other that were against what the government wanted but it's probably a large number.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#48> “We look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint – that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.” My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.
That’s because they have such a good track record wrt to privacy?
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#49Who do they expect to fall for the claims that a Facebook owned messenger couldn't read your "encrypted" messages? It's truly funny. Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.
> Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.
Not just the USA. This is basically universal.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#50yes, this is a very known fact that it is not E2EE but Client2Server Encrypted. Otherwise your message history wouldn't work.