221–230 of 266 posts
Beginning to think the reason security is so difficult is because ostensibly "good" companies do everything an attacker does and worse, but under the guise of EULAs. Here's a thought experiement: If Facebook were malware, could you get rid of it?
Any sufficiently advanced form of advertising is indistinguishable from malware.
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Excuse me, but what? My friends text and call me through WhatsApp or Facebook. If anything, me ditching those two services would justify them not reaching out, because it implies I’m the difficult one. Me making it difficult to be reached does not mean they’re not my friends. EDIT: > And There’s FaceTime if your far from friend. Stop relying on Facebook to connect you… I'm not even sure to describe how ignorant this…
>Me making it difficult to be reached does not mean they’re not my friends. Is phone and SMS considered 'difficult' now? Everyone I know simply uses SMS and phone calls. I suppose if you have globally distributed friends groups, this could be difficult, otherwise I don't see why. You give up a few features and it's not the most secure but it's a viable alternative almost everyone has access to.
If you want large groups/numbers of people to do something, you have to make it as easy and frictionless as possible for them.
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I think someone caught the app dumping private keys to crashlogs.whatsapp.net But a MITM should still be visible More details?
Law enforcement has access to a list of people who forwarded particular links or media. This indicates that e2e has some bypasses or exceptions. It would be pretty much impossible to unearth the details though.
It’s probably done on the device, with suspicious links and media sent to the servers for further inspection.
We are also sure some of their engineers worked on methods to detect bypasses on the checks.
It’s a leak of data and metadata, a privacy invasion for sure, but not comparable to a MITM.
This is an OS privacy bug, and isn't specific to Facebook. If an app does not have location permissions, it should not receive the geolocation portion of photos' EXIF metadata.
I don’t think that’s a sufficient fix though. E.g. many people may enable location sharing to messenger for legitimate uses like meeting up with friends in public places, and for a “15m of location shared to friend” feature they would need to turn location sharing up to at least the “allow while app is running” setting, but people doing that would surely not also intend for the app to also get the location of every p…
This is an OS privacy bug, and isn't specific to Facebook. If an app does not have location permissions, it should not receive the geolocation portion of photos' EXIF metadata.
The only difference is their size and capability to retaliate as compared to any other App developer.
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>Whether I opt out has a real impact on me, but zero impact on whether they can run disinformation campaigns and swing elections. Being the change you want to see doesn't automatically mean the world changes. It just means live with principles regardless of external factors. You don't like Facebook? Then don't use Facebook. It's as simple as that. Others can take it or leave it. I just see it as people complaining ab…
> You don't like Facebook? Then don't use Facebook It’s hard though, because what alternative do people have? I didn’t log in to my Facebook account for 7 years, and I got way out of touch with most of my old friends in different cities.
Sure, occasionally people get frustrated that you are not on these platforms, however I ended up being lot more responsive and attentive to non social media forms of communication. Social media is usually low effort, I rather have one person wishing me with personal email on my birthday, rather than hundreds of meaningless FB posts.
It was actually harder for business contacts than personal, customers want to chat in whatever works for them, harder to say no to someone paying you. However Teams/Slack has helped a lot and dose of compliance reasons which customers find easier to go along with.
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> incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions. Living in a country where local social networks are more popular with general population than foreign ones (Russia), I'd rather prefer FAANG. "Local companies" may sound good because the word "local" has some nice connotations, like your "local store" or "local coffee shop". But in reality, "local companies" do all the bad stuff that Facebook does,…
We don't need local solutions, we need FOSS solutions so everyone can see exactly what's going on.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, let's stick to the better one of the bad choices we have.
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I stopped using Facebook and just started phoning and texting people a few years ago. Almost all the contact you have with people on Facebook is fake, it’s mostly sharing memes and news. It’s more personal to do that over the phone. I think I’m closer with almost everyone since leaving Facebook. Most of my contacts have installed signal of their own accord at some point too which is weird but pleasant
This probably works ok if all of your friends live in the same country as you (and that country still widely uses SMS). However it turns out that international calls/texts are still an expensive minefield, and folks who move around internationally don't have stable phone numbers (since those are tied to country). And as a result, WhatsApp/Messenger is the only viable communication method for a lot of folks.
Even if SMS is expensive, email is still quite free. It works almost like SMS/messaging on phone, you get push notifications on your phone and you respond.
I move around about countries every few months, keeping a VOIP/Skype phone number as the number anyone can reach you at works for me, while my local number is more for getting an internet connection and occasionally for signups to local apps (like rideshares, food delivery etc) that reject some VoIP numbers .
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They could fix the problem regardless of whether the app was downloaded from the app store, a third party store, or just sideloaded, so I don't see what you're getting at.
It sounds like you are saying this issue is irrelevant to the App Store. So how can it reflect badly on their case? The way it reflects well, is to notice that this is a small hole in their privacy measures which can easily be fixed, and the only reason we are talking about it is that for the most part their privacy controls work well . I.e. it demonstrates their seriousness about privacy.
Because these privacy violations are happening despite their locked down App Store.
> The way it reflects well, is to notice that this is a small hole in their privacy measures which can easily be fixed
Sure, it reflects well on Apple as a whole, but not on the app store. This issue is just as easy to fix for sideloaded apps because it's related to OS level permissions which sideloaded apps would still be subject to.
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>Me making it difficult to be reached does not mean they’re not my friends. Is phone and SMS considered 'difficult' now? Everyone I know simply uses SMS and phone calls. I suppose if you have globally distributed friends groups, this could be difficult, otherwise I don't see why. You give up a few features and it's not the most secure but it's a viable alternative almost everyone has access to.
Well, I live abroad, my family and friends have various group chats on WhatsApp and Messenger. I can’t blame them for not wanting to include me, since it would cost them quite a bit of money to text or call me. Plus, phone calls are quite different from general text messages. Messages allows anyone to reply on a time they’re free for it. So in general, yes, SMS is considered difficult, in my situation. The main thing…
It is kind of funny as every Andriod or iOS phone user effectively gets an email account as part of their access to the platform so it not like this generation doesn't have email.
Also everyone uses email for app registrations, bank accounts and for some formal communication so it not like they don't know how to use either.
It seems we have forgotten that we did live abroad and kept in touch via tools with no vendor lock twenty years ago, telecom (SMS/phone) was lot more expensive then as well.
Ultimately use what you like if you find WhatsApp more useful sure, however forcing a vendor locked in platform on to others I find is incredibly rude.
I am not forcing you to lock into a vendor when I call/SMS/email you.