Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#22

Post by keyme »

Isn't there client side code in every Whatsapp client that analyzes your messages and sends data to FB for ad targeting?

I know for a fact they can block certain message content from being sent. So at least a hash of every message is sent to FB. This isn't very far from it.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#23

Post by nounaut »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #15

While from a technology point of view this is very interesting, I would really prefer an option to pay a reasonable subscription fee to have adverts turned off for me. Before Facebook bought WhatsApp it actually used to require a small annual fee, but it was removed. Alas, I fear that as tends be the case with advertising companies, they know that the willing to pay users are the most valuable advert audience, so are…

There's Youtube Premium Lite now which just stops the ads.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#24

Post by deweller »

Well, I suppose it is possible to target ads to specific users without knowing anything about the user other than an anonymous user ID.

Of course, this requires one to trust that Facebook is not actually collecting any identifying info. The temptation to cut corners for more profit or for sheer expediency might be hard to resist.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#25

Post by [deleted] »

nounaut wrote: post #23
jonathanlydall wrote: post #15

While from a technology point of view this is very interesting, I would really prefer an option to pay a reasonable subscription fee to have adverts turned off for me. Before Facebook bought WhatsApp it actually used to require a small annual fee, but it was removed. Alas, I fear that as tends be the case with advertising companies, they know that the willing to pay users are the most valuable advert audience, so are…

There's Youtube Premium Lite now which just stops the ads.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#27

Post by danuker »

> Update: Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, has tweeted in response to The Information's report that WhatsApp is not exploring the use of homomorphic encryption. Cathcart states that there should be skepticism of "technical claims that apps like ours could see messages in "good" cases only."

There is no way to match advertising keywords in encrypted content without also allowing matches of arbitrary keywords, at which point the encryption is broken.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#28

Post by bovine3dom »

tmcb wrote: post #10
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #3

> [...] is hoped to allow companies to read information from encrypted sets of data while also preserving privacy [...] These tow items sound mutually exclusive.

Not only that, but if they can generate meaningful targeted advertising from encrypted data, that would be pretty a strong indicator that the encryption method is not strong enough. Ideally, encrypted data must be indistinguishable from random noise.

As another comment mentioned, they're talking about using a technique that allows you to perform computations on encrypted data, with encrypted results output - the thing doing the computation never sees any decrypted data.

So they could target advertisements but, as far as I can tell, they wouldn't be able to know which advertisements were served ... until the phone makes a request to download them, which seems to me to render it fairly but not entirely pointless.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#29

Post by paxys »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #15

While from a technology point of view this is very interesting, I would really prefer an option to pay a reasonable subscription fee to have adverts turned off for me. Before Facebook bought WhatsApp it actually used to require a small annual fee, but it was removed. Alas, I fear that as tends be the case with advertising companies, they know that the willing to pay users are the most valuable advert audience, so are…

I keep telling people that YouTube Premium is the most cost effective membership there is, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Since I got it YouTube has become a service I genuinely love.
Post reply on HN