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US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

bloomberg.com

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Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#111

Post by gherkinnn »

xvector wrote: post #52
renegade-otter wrote: post #41

Anyone trusting Facebook to follow basic human decency and, yes, laws, is a fool.

Anyone blindly believing every random allegation is also a fool, especially when the app in question has been thoroughly reverse engineered and you can freely check for yourself that it's using the same protocol as Signal for encryption

Allegations against a company who circumvented Android's security to track users?

I don't have any proof that Meta stores WhatsApp messages but I feel it in my bones that at the very least tried to do so. And if ever that comes to light, precisely nobody will be surprised.

https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#112

Post by cosmicgadget »

varenc wrote: post #79
cosmicgadget wrote: post #32

> “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.

If this was happening en-masse, wouldn't this be discovered by the many people reverse engineering WhatsApp? Reverse engineering is hard sophisticated work, but given how popular WhatsApp is plenty of independent security researchers are doing it. I'm quite skeptical Meta could hide some malicious code in WhatsApp that's breaking the E2EE without it being discovered.

Well they wouldn't be breaking e2ee, they'd be breaking the implicit promise of e2ee. The chats are still inaccessible to intermediaries, they'd just be stored elsewhere. Like Apple and Microsoft do.

I am not familiar with the state of app RE. But between code obfuscators and the difficulty of distinguishing between 'normal' phone home data and user chats when doing static analysis... I'd say it's not out of the question.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#113

Post by wasabi991011 »

youknownothing wrote: post #104

Just to throw in a couple of possibly outlandish theories: 1. as others have said, they could be collecting the encrypted messages and then tried to decrypt them using quantum computing, the Chinese have been reportedly trying to do this for many years now. 2. with metadata and all the information from other sources, they could infer what the conversation is about without the need to decrypt it: if I visit a page (Fa…

Re. quantum computing: no chance, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs they would need are too outlandish, like claiming China already had a 2026-level frontier model back in 2016.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#114

Post by hiprob »

I know the default assumption with Telegram is that they can read all your messages, but unlike WhatsApp they seem less cooperative and I never got the notion that they ever read private messages until the Macron incident, and even then they do if the other party reports them. How come they are able to be this exception despite not having end to end encryption by default?

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#115

Post by FabHK »

Snoozus wrote: post #92
nindalf wrote: post #77

This reads like a nothingburger. Couple of quotes from the article: > the idea that WhatsApp can selectively and retroactively access the content of [end-to-end encrypted] individual chats is a mathematical impossibility > Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was “a bit strange”. “It seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don’t know much about them or their credibilit…

I find this wording also "a bit strange". It is not a mathematical impossibility in any way. For example they might be able to read the backups, the keys might be somehow (accidentaly or not) leaked... And then the part about Telegram not having end2end encryption? What's this all about?

Telegram defaults to not e2ee; you have to initiate a "secret" chat to get e2ee.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#116

Post by solenoid0937 »

youknownothing wrote: post #104

Just to throw in a couple of possibly outlandish theories: 1. as others have said, they could be collecting the encrypted messages and then tried to decrypt them using quantum computing, the Chinese have been reportedly trying to do this for many years now. 2. with metadata and all the information from other sources, they could infer what the conversation is about without the need to decrypt it: if I visit a page (Fa…

(1) made me chuckle. I've worked at nearly every FAANG including Meta. These companies aren't nearly as advanced or competent as you think.

I no longer work at Meta, but in my mind a more likely scenario than (1) is: a senior engineer proposes a 'Decryption at Scale' framework solely to secure their E6 promo, and writes a 40-page Google Doc to farm 'direction' points for PSC. Five PMs repost this on Workplace to celebrate the "alignment" so they can also include it in their PSCs.

The TL and PMs immediately abandon the project after ratings are locked because they already farmed the credit for it. The actual implementation gets assigned to an E4 bootcamp grad who is told by a non-technical EM to pivot 3 months in because it doesn't look like 'measurable impact' in a perf packet. The E4 gets fired to fill the layoff quota and everyone else sails off into the sunset.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#117

Post by fn-mote »

random3 wrote: post #48
cosmicgadget wrote: post #32

> “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...

That document is the dismissal of claims by an economist about Facebook’s privacy practices. I don’t see how it supports your argument.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#118

Post by Forgeties79 »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #68
Forgeties79 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got caught torrenting unbelievable amounts of content, an act that committed even just a few times can get my home Internet shut down with no recourse (best outcome). Literally nothing happened. Combine the fact that nothing legally significant ever happens to them with zuckerburg’s colossal ego and complete lack of ethical foundation, and you have quite the recipe. And I’m not even getting into the obvious nega…

> Literally nothing happened. The true wealthy live by an entirely different set of rules than the rest of us, especially when they are willing to prostrate themselves to the US President. This has always been true to some degree, but is both more true than ever (there used to be some limits based on accepted decorum) plus they just dont even try to hide it anymore.

I think the not hiding it part is what’s starting to stick in my craw. We all knew it was happening on some level, but we felt that there were at least some boundaries somewhere out there even if they were further than ours. Now it just feels like the federal government basically doesn’t exist and companies can do whatever they want to us.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#119

Post by modeless »

gruez wrote: post #105
modeless wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the link you would know that contrary to your expectation other apps advertising E2EE such as Google's Messages app don't allow the app maker to read your messages from your backups. And turning off backups doesn't help when everyone else has them enabled. Apple doesn't respect your backup settings on other people's accounts. Again, other apps address this problem in various ways, but not iMessage.

>If you read the link you would know that contrary to your expectation other apps advertising E2EE don't allow the app maker to read your messages. What does that even mean? Suppose icloud backups doesn't exist, but you could still take screenshots and save them to icloud drive. Is that also "Apple has always been able to read encrypted iMessage messages"? Same goes for "other people having icloud backups enabled". P…

It means, for example, Google Messages uses E2EE backups. Google cannot read your E2EE messages by default, period. Not from your own backup, not from other peoples' backups. No backup loophole. Most other E2EE messaging apps also do not have a backup loophole like iMessage.

It's not hard to understand why Apple uploading every message to themselves to read by default is different from somebody intentionally taking a screenshot of their own phone.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#120

Post by cosmicgadget »

gruez wrote: post #84
cosmicgadget wrote: post #32

> “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.

>being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook That's a cute loophole you thought up, but whatsapp's marketing is pretty unequivocal that they can't read your messages. >With end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, your personal messages and calls are secured with a lock. Only you and the person you're talking to can read or listen to them, and no one else, not even WhatsApp https://www.whatsapp.com/ That…

Are messages and calls data at rest or data in motion? The UI lock feature refers to 'chats' which could be their term for data at rest.

I wonder what the eula says.

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