Head of WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) responded:
“We're not pursuing homomorphic encryption for @WhatsApp…”
Full tweet: https://twitter.com/wcathcart/status/1422611553954668546?s=2...
Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
101–106 of 106 posts
Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
#102I just wish AdTech companies had a system where you could fill out an extensive form, where you openly state what your preferences are, because the targeting seems very skewed and wrong, at least from what I've experienced. Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Faceb…
Ads are intended to make you to need something new, or to like something that you don’t need.
Ads showing you something you cannot afford can increase your desire of it, thus envying who can afford it, etc.
An ad appearing over and over is not necessarily intended to make you buy something. There are lot of sociological and psychological implications behind.
Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
#103Can someone explain this? How can they not know what I'm talking about on WhatsApp if they show me targeted ads?
The article mentions homomorphic encryption, which is a way to perform computation on encrypted text, yielding encrypted results _without_ revealing the plaintext. Instead of f(x) → y, you do f(encrypted(x)) → encrypted(y).
So if you think of a function 'f' that can take text content and produce a relevant ad for it, and an encryption algorithm that converts plaintext 'x' into an encrypted 'X', then instead of running f(x) and getting an ad 'y', you'd instead run homomorphic_apply(f, X) – on the encrypted text – and you'd get an encrypted ad 'Y' without revealing 'x'. The device can keep the keys and do the decryption of 'Y', but running 'f' using homomorphic_apply can happen on the server side.
In principle homomorphic encryption is very cool and the "trick" involved to get fully homomorphic encryption described in Craig Gentry's dissertation in 2009 is pretty amazing. When it finally clicked for me I thought this was one of the most clever papers I'd ever read and truly a "mind: blown" moment.
That said, this is Facebook. As others have pointed out here, there's no need for such fancy processing and it makes much more sense to run the targeting algorithm on-device with access to the plaintext.
Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
#104i am sure “they” are reading this, others downvote me but, maybe ask our opinion before signup, like a quick 3 question survey. that would be less extreme than sounding creepy
Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
#105Zuckerberg said that they combat spam on WhatsApp not by reading your messages because since they are end to end encrypted they are obviously unable to do it but by analyzing your metadata and your behavior on the service. So I assume the same strategy can be used for ads. Encryption is not a problem; if I'm not mistaken various security agencies in USA also bet on metadata when strong encryption is in question.
Perhaps we consumers should demand E2EE metadata then? Would such a thing be theoretically feasible? Or not because it would be like Tor with the entire Internet controlled by the adversary?
I don't know about E2EE metadata but I was referring to WhatsApp metadata in general, for example: "Alice sent 3 messages to Bob at 7:05 AM"
Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads
#106What's that quote again from that early engineer? The smartest, highest paid engineers, and they fucking work on making you view more ads. We're living in an embarrassing era of massively misallocated resources.
This 100%