51–60 of 106 posts
People are discussing a lot of advanced encryption in this thread, but the much more simpler explanation is that they will do the ad processing client side where the messages are already in plain text.
TBH I am surprised they're not already doing that?
The moment ads arrive, I'm done.
I get the need to make money but this isn't it. *
* look at what Google did to Youtube for an abject demonstration in how to ruin your own platform ... 6 second ads because longer and longer, became multiple ads became full screen ads, became un-skippable, became ... all completely blocked or piped in separately now otherwise I'd go bananas.
How dare they try to make money from their business
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.
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'm not very well versed in encryption but I know many here are and wanted to see if how I imagined this has any merit - is this something where WhatsApp could encrypt messages word by word instead of by message, and keep a list of the hashes of top sent words and their counts somewhere, then facebook would send some ads directory to WhatsApp clients, where they'd encrypt each keyword in the dictionary, and then comp…
At a quick inspection this kind of thing would result in pretty bad encryption. A hash of each word (unless salted with a different salt each time, defeating the purpose) is easily broken, even if the hash is a cryptographic hash. I.e. I can build up a dictionary by hashing the top 100k most common words. This kind of attack is why every encryption needs some randomness (or something that's changing) injected to it. It's also unprotected against replay attacks, etc. And I'm probably just scratching the surface.
You really have to encrypt full messages. And sending the same message twice has to result in different ciphertexts. And you need nonces. And probably many other things. Cryptography is hard.
I'm not very well versed in encryption but I know many here are and wanted to see if how I imagined this has any merit - is this something where WhatsApp could encrypt messages word by word instead of by message, and keep a list of the hashes of top sent words and their counts somewhere, then facebook would send some ads directory to WhatsApp clients, where they'd encrypt each keyword in the dictionary, and then comp…
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 Facebook what my tastes and lifestyle preferences even are.
Facebook just infers based on keywords and what things I interact with on their platform, which is a terrible way to gauge preferences, since I could talk about cars in a comment, per se, but that doesn't mean I drive.
It's the same with all other ADs I get. They're all almost fraudulently inaccurate, and as an engineer I think we should be building things that work properly, are lucrative on their own merit, and not based on borderline fraud.
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.
I 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…
[√] Doesn't like ads.