As someone formerly working for one of the largest WhatsApp messaging API providers, this whole controversy is really unfortunate.
The problem boils down to the way the business API works: as WhatsApp is using e2e messaging, they could not simply offer a standard HTTP API for customers to use. In that case, WhatsApp would have to read messages received via such an API, and user responses to send webhooks.
To solve this problem, they provided a Docker stack that would essentially spin up a specialised WhatsApp Client on the customer’s infrastructure - so you’d be running the API locally, send and receive messages in your own network, and the client would handle encryption before transmitting to the WhatsApp servers. All containers would connect to a local SQL database to store their data, and included a REST API (curiously written in PHP).
To handle high load, you had to spin up more images in distinct patterns and configure sharding per stack.
This was a nice, albeit highly technical solution to the problem. As WhatsApp partners we built lots and lots of additional infrastructure to manage 12000 individual Docker-Compose stacks in a distributed, reliable way. That worked surprisingly well, but obviously is way too complex.
So in the end WhatsApp concluded it would be easier to take care of the container hosting themselves, shoving them into AWS, integrated with the Facebook business manager.
And all this lead to a necessary change in the terms of service, as WhatsApp hosting containers in AWS opened the possibility of e2e no longer being given.
These are all technical and business considerations that make clear that the change in terms of service are not bad. I don't think the controvery is about the change in terms, but more about what is and was already happening.
If WhatsApp is doing things that are just on the border of legal, or let's say unpleasant for a lot of people, every time the terms of service get updated, people will be confronted with them. That is a risk, looking at what WhatsApp is doing. If I were CEO of WhatsApp I would want to be as quiet as possible about what kind of things that are happening outside of view. Every change to these terms of service, every time you point them out, you run the risk of people complaining about all the unpleasant things that are happening.
It's not really unfortunate, it's the consequence of having e2e encryption: either you (as a business) have to handle everything or you deletage, and that delegation needs to be clear to the user.
Were businesses not ready to run the client themselves ?
With unfortunate, I intended to refer to the way the situation was picked up by the general public: The change to the ToS necessary was only intended to make it easier for businesses to get started with the WhatsApp Business API, not a sneaky way to read user's messages.
The delegation is still in place in terms of encryption: Everything the client sends or receives is encrypted or decrypted using a client-local private key, even if the client is running on AWS servers, rented by WhatsApp. In theory, noone but the business itself has access to the data the client processes, plus it's an optional service: You're still free to host the client yourself. It's just easy to mess up.
Take a look at the documentation for a recommended production setup if you'd like to get a peek:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/installation/p...
Can anyone explain the move to Telegram to me? I understand the UX argument, Telegram is amazing. But privacy? Aren't you moving from "Facebook can read your metadata" to "Pavel Durov can read your every message"? How is that an improvement?
I mean, I too trust Durov more than Zuckerberg but that's an extremely low bar to clear, and you're giving them a lot more data.
In fact, WhatsApp is better than Telegram because whatsapp has e2e by default.
Personally I use Telegram because of public searchable groups. Nice way to meet new people with same interests.
You’re definitely, definitely wrong. This is not true.
WhatsApp messages have E2E encryption by default, you can not opt out, and the keys (each message has a different one) are never sent to WhatsApp or anybody else.
Users may OPTIONALLY enable a cloud backup, which puts an encrypted backup on iCloud or Google Drive. WhatsApp (Facebook) holds the key for this, but not the data, and law enforcement would need the cooperation of Facebook and Google/Apple to access the messages.
But that is all completely opt-in. By default, messages are not backed up, contrary to what you said.
Full disclosure: I use WhatsApp but am eager to switch away from it a soon as Signal implements a local backup on iOS.
> WhatsApp (Facebook) holds the key for this, but not the data, and law enforcement would need the cooperation of Facebook and Google/Apple to access the messages.
It is a plaintext backup to Google Drive, whatsapp does not encrypt it before uploading it to Drive or iCloud.
You cannot control your contacts backup settings. Every contact I have (100+) has enabled the backup option, meaning all my 'e2ee' chats are uploaded in plaintext to Google servers.
With Telegram, I can be sure e2ee/secret chats with my contacts are not going anywhere other than the device they were delivered to.
You can reverse-engineer an App and check its logic and protocol. Whatsapp is popupar enough, so I'm sure that many people do that and if E2E were fake, they would let everyone know.
Yet WA defaults to not notifying contacts when keys change. So silent interception is more likely to go unnoticed. And any app could send an automatic update with a backdoor at any moment.
Disassembly and analysis is also harder with binaries than original sources and an open, reproducible build process.
Did they change this? I distinctly remember that after WhatsApp introduced e2e encryption I got a message every time somebody got a new phone. Haven't seen one in a while, though.
This is false, because WhatsApp backs up your keys to the cloud by default, meaning anyone can read your messages with a simple court order. Additionally, even if you decline to back them up your contacts may have.
So you have no idea whether it's actually E2E encrypted, and by default it is not.
It sounds like you are suggesting it is not E2EE because keys are backed up to Google/Apple. That’s not true, it still is E2EE. It just by default has a backup of the key.
Sure, if your threat model means you are worried about the key backups and particularly your friends key backups, you shouldn’t use WhatsApp.
I’m not sure how you end up at Telegram with that threat model.. but whatever floats your boat.
I’d wager most people care more about FB not being able to read their messages. And they can’t. Maybe one day that changes but they will be required to communicate those changes.
Telegram secret chat keys are never uploaded anywhere.
Encryption is literally not E2EE if the private keys are uploaded to some random third party, maybe even without your knowledge (you have no idea what your contacts have done).
I got signal, telegram and element.io . I encourage non technically savvy people to go to signal and technically savvy people to go to element. But I see a lot of normal people switching to telegram.
Possibly just network effect due to the whatsapp exodus. If somebody you want to communicate with only has telegram, you also download it.
Orders of magnitude slower. Scrolling through past messages in Telegram is insanely fast. Not sure if it's Matrix or Element but there is a lot left to be desired there. And the longer it exists, the more it seems architectural. Not talking E2E groups. This isn't to take anything away from the Matrix folks who are doing an outstanding job.
On what platform are you seeing this? Element is three different apps on iOS/Android/Web and they implement scrolling differently. There is no architectural reason in Matrix why it should be slower than TG.
They are probably talking about the Matrix.org instance being slow at fetching messages for you, additionally to the delay needed to get keys for them in encrypted rooms.
This is far nicer on smaller home servers, but matrix.org is the "default experience" of element and that's what people are judging it by.
Probably because the people developing these clients aren't being bankrolled by multi-million dollar companies with private interests. The previous poster was correct; Matrix is a protocol, and so your performance really comes down to whatever client you're using it with. Element is a web app, so it will inevitably be pretty slow. If you want a client that won't slow down, look into Fractal, a GTK Matrix frontend written in Rust. If that doesn't iron out your performance issues, you just have a slow machine/connection.
Fractal is actually responsive, I am actually impressed. It's not bankrolled by multi-million dollar companies though and Telegram web app is way faster so something doesn't add.
Funny how you mention this - scrolling back manually is literally the only way to go to past conversations on mobile, as the search does not work with inflected languages. The only way to search for past content is to dump your whole message history on the desktop client and run grep on it.
Durov is in self-imposed exile from the Russian government.
His public image carries more weight than Zuckerberg ever could (I don't think Zuckerberg could become a public figure in the next decades like Gates is).
> On 16 April 2014 Durov publicly refused to hand over data of Ukrainian protesters to Russia's security agencies and block Alexei Navalny's page on VK.[4] Instead he posted the relevant orders on his own VK page [23][24] claiming that the requests were unlawful.
> On 21 April 2014 Durov was dismissed as CEO of VK. The company claimed it was acting on his letter of resignation a month earlier that he failed to recall.[4][25] Durov then claimed the company had been effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin's allies,[25][26] suggesting his ouster was the result of both his refusal to hand over personal details of users to federal law enforcement and his refusal to hand over the personal details of people who were members of a VK group dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement.[25][26] Durov then left Russia and stated that he had "no plans to go back"[26] and that "the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment".[4]
I am not really a conspiracy person. I am saying that because this will sound conspiratorial and I am aware of that. I certainly think I am looking at things from a probabilistic and alignment perspective.
Is he a russian agent? Probably not. But, he's not dead or in prison, I'd say that counts against him. He's complied with fighting "extremeism" in Russia. If Russia did want a view into international communications they would have to publicly distance themself from him. I'm not saying it is the case, but I think the chance is pretty far from 0. Certainly everyone benefits from the appearance that he and Russia do not get along. The chance his co workers are russian is higher, and therefore the chance that Russia has leverage (money/property/family/blackmail etc) directly over at least one employee seems pretty non trivial.
I don't see any good reason to believe Russia or himself are distant on purely the grounds that both of them say so.
Is freedom/what's morally right a guiding light? Well, it's run out of Dubai, the middle east isn't exactly a shining star of liberal ideals. Not everything is encrypted automatically.
Are they consistent? Company is supposed to be a non profit entity but isn't structured that way.
Are they aligned with privacy? Their revenue model is ads, a revenue model with deep precedence for violations of privacy. I see no reason that he wouldn't take a zuckerbergian approach.
I don't find telegram to be any more trustable than Facebook. If I were using a platform for political speech, something I could be blackmailed for, or anything else that would get a state actor interested in me both seem like equally bad choices.
Since WhatsApp is closed source, you can't know that there isn't some sort of encryption backdoor in there anyway, so in both cases it comes down to trust that the company is doing what they say they're doing.
When you read how the cloud encryption works in Telegram, with the encryption keys stored in different data centres and even different countries to protect against any one person or group being able to read them, I personally feel pretty happy with that. (See https://telegram.org/privacy#3-3-1-cloud-chats)
Having the messages stored in the cloud and not having to rely on my phone (except for registration) is a huge win for me personally. Especially during the lockdown I almost exclusively use desktop versions of these and the Telegram one is great.
WhatsApp’s encryption occurs on my phone and can I can verify it by examining the client binaries, regardless of whether it’s open source. Telegram’s story about the nine keys divided between the realms of the human, elves, orcs etc is just a story on a website. You should only trust it if you believe that organizations who want your data can’t invent a good story.
And you do this every time there is a new WhatsApp version? How confident are you that you can find any backdoor in the binary? And it doesn't have to be in the encryption/decryption part, all it would need to do is hide the encryption key in a message back to the server, so you'd have to inspect the entire binary every time. Even if you do have the time and skill to do this it's not exactly feasible for most people.
I'm not trying to argue that there is a backdoor, just that in both cases you have to rely on trust.
> You should only trust it if you believe that organizations who want your data can’t invent a good story.
It's not just inventing a story though, their backend is also open source so they've also implemented this story. Of course that doesn't mean there isn't a backdoor in the production version, but you see how the trust you need in both cases is the same.
Edit: Actually the backend isn't open source, I was thinking of signal
Firstly, by default WhatsApp backs up your encryption keys to the cloud making your messages totally accessible and not E2E encrypted at all.
Secondly, Telegram secret messages have been repeatedly proven to be E2E encrypted, including by independent researchers, so "Pavel can read all your messages!" is just misinformation.
As for the alternatives, well Signal is very likely compromised given their server repo is abandoned and they refuse to address why (they maintain a closed source version). Why else would an "open source project" act that way, if not gagged?
This is NOT true. Message keys are never sent to the cloud in WhatsApp, no matter what.
You’re referring to the optional backup that requires users to opt-in. This sends an encrypted blob of all your messages to Apple/Google, and WhatsApp holds the key (but not the data) to that. Both companies would need to cooperate to read your messages, and this is OPT-IN by default.
This isn’t E2EE, but it’s opt-in by default. It also has nothing to do with the key exchange for E2EE messages.
You’re comparing WhatsApp, with all messages end-to-end encrypted and where the only way to compromise that is an opt-in cloud backup, to Telegram, where the vast majority of people (anyone using cloud chats) do not use Telegram’s encryption.
Full disclosure: I begrudgingly use WhatsApp. I really don’t like it. You’re spreading misinformation, though.
> This sends an encrypted blob of all your messages to Apple/Google, and WhatsApp holds the key
It is a plain text backup to Google Drive. There is no key Whatsapp holds. Google can read it all, and has revealed the chats to help the Govt in multiple high profile cases here in India.
> You’re referring to the optional backup that requires users to opt-in.
With telegram, if you enable secret chats, it is never backed up to the cloud. It is a guarantee, unlike Whatsapp where you do not know whether your contact has enabled cloud backups
Full disclosure: I begrudgingly use WhatsApp. I really don’t like it. You’re spreading misinformation, though.
I don't understand this argument, it's okay for an "open source project" to abandon their server repo with no explanation and if it's compromised and leaking metadata to third parties it's fine?
In The Netherlands I see now for the first time in forever that it’s not a dealbreaker to not have WhatsApp.
If you don’t have it, people understand why. If you’re in a small to medium sized chat group, people are willing to move it to Signal or an alternative, they are not afraid anymore to try the non-default option.
Something weird happened in my neighborhood where a bunch of people were suddenly phished/hacked through WhatsApp and its SMS-based authentication. My girlfriend must have clicked a link in a text message that gave an adversary control over her WhatsApp and locked her out of it. That person then requested money from her friends and started phishing her contacts through groups--they didn't have actual access to her contacts.
She was on Android and was able to recover her account and we set up 2FA. Her friends were not so lucky, many of those with iPhones apparently had to change phone numbers to make it stop. I don't understand why but I also couldn't see their phones.
Anyhow, I encouraged people to give Signal a try. It at least doesn't send links that can hand over your account by text.
For me it seems like Signal is winning. I started seeing more of the rural 50+ people on Signal that I haven't seen on Telegram yet. (Obvious aside, many of them are still on WhatsApp but Signal is where I've been surprised to see them too).
I'm in Germany. I get the very occasional message via signal but it doesn't look very widespread yet. It seems, mostly people installed it on their phone and then reverted back to using whatsapp because that's just the default for a lot of people. I also have Telegram installed but have zero activity there. Just my observation. It might be different outside my bubble of friends and family.
I've so far not accepted the new whatsapp terms of use just because I'm curious to see if they will actually pull the trigger on this and disable access. I know many people that are sufficiently annoyed to refuse to click "agree" on that one for the same reason.
My prediction is that Whatsapp will weasel their way out of that one when their self imposed deadline comes up by simply forgetting about it. I agreed to terms of use when I first used the app. So, they could just drop the whole thing and accept defeat. If there's something in these new terms that they need me to agree to, they just need to come out and tell us what that it is exactly. Either it matters or it never did. They are basically saying it doesn't matter but we still need to agree. The corporate weaseling is what is generating the suspicion. And of course Facebook doesn't have a great track record in general.
The alternative may be having to disable millions of accounts which would predictably lead to lots of the remaining users discovering Signal or other solutions when their exiled friends start using those exclusively. I don't see why Facebook would want to let that just happen. So postpone, silently drop the the new terms of use (because as they assure us over and over again there's nothing new in there anyway), and move on.
Except the way they manage contacts. It is a complete mess - I have contacts that changed their phone and there is NO WAY to remove them from the Signal contacts.
They are not present in any of my phone contacts but somehow cannot leave Signal.
THANK YOU. This actually worked! Talk about the magic of IT.
Would you have an idea how to do the same exercise on a (Windows) desktop? I will just uninstall and reinstall but if there is a less invasive solution that would be wonderful.
Sorry, I use a Mac so can't advise about Windows, though I have the same problem on the Mac app and I'm stuck with a few old contacts that I just can't remove without reinstalling the application itself.
In my country, lots of younger folks (college students), use telegram as oppose of whatsapp. Telegram is used widely for studying groups and other features (also piracy). Whatsapp is still the dominant in business though
I’m curious how the German state deals with ethnic nationalist content on Telegram, which is illegal for Germans. A lot of channels where people do the Roman salute, talk about natives heading to minority status, and other things illegal. Afaik Telegram is not censorable and the servers are in Russia
It is not. Consuming it is absolutely legal. It is even in our constitution that the state does not censor.
What is illegal is "making" (for lack or a better word) hate speech and inciting violence.
Example: You can buy Hitler's "Mein Kampf" since 2015. Before that it wasn't possible just because Bavaria held the rights after Hitler's death and refused to publish uncommented full versions. Since books enter the free domain 70 years after the author's death, Mein Kampf entered it in 2015.
The servers are definitely not in Russia because the team had to leave Russia due to the pressure from the government which outlawed it a few years ago. IIRC it runs on AWS because I remember when Russian government started banning Telegram IP ranges a lot of AWS-based sites became unavailable in Russia as collateral damage
among those lines of "lot of incorrect or inaccurate information",
>DER SPIEGEL: Soon after you announced your new privacy policies, chain letters started circulating on WhatsApp. People recommended other messenger apps like Signal, Threema or Telegram and said WhatsApp would read phone books and misuse the contacts.
Cathcart: There is a lot of incorrect or inaccurate information. That’s why we have delayed the update and send additional information to users directly in WhatsApp. Let me be very clear: We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.
>WhatsApp would read phone books and misuse the contacts?
We cannot read your messages, we cannot listen to your calls. When you send your location over WhatsApp, we do not know where you are.
Because Whatsapp abuses contacts. I tried to send a message to someone without adding him to my contacts, but I did not find a way to do so in iOS. I had to add that number to my contacts and allow whatsapp full access to those.
And it's actually this information Facebook is interested in, to build the "social graph".
The content doesn't matter, it knows who you communicate with and how often, and that's already a privacy concern (wife wants to know if husband cheats on her with someone else? and so on).
But of course the WhatsApp CEO doesn't mention this ... much easier to say "we don't look at your content" to give it the spin they need.
"When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name."
That's the weakness of current chat tools right there. They can't listen in but they do know when you talked to whom and how long, how often, etc. In fairness, Signal and Telegram are similarly dependent on phone numbers. The traffic might be encrypted but even just knowing who talked to whom, when is useful.
Yeah, this was demonstrated greatly in the Navalny/Bellingcat investigation of his poisoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhi6jts97I . They bribed the appropriate providers to get phone call records and could see how the agents would be ringing each other and up the chain of command around the time of certain events. If an "enemy of the state" could do this, imagine what the state, or the owners of the data, could do.
Funny as if saying "just the phone numbers and not the names" should make us feel safe, Facebook already asks for your phone number, and could correlate your data that way.
i believe signal uses the phones contact list, but telegram manages its own contact list, and i can add telegram contacts contacts without knowing their phone number or adding them to my phone contact list. i can also block my number from being shared with anyone.
the only thing the number is needed for is to create a new account.
Assumably because they know who you talked to, when you talked to them and for how long and with an approximate location. They also have a good idea of what you were doing at the time from their cookies / "facebook integrations" over the greater internet.
Not sure if we can trust anything coming from FB or Google type of large corp under US national security surveillance capitalism state (with conflicting business model against user privacy) regarding what they really do with user data. Any corporation with association with the intelligence agency and the military industrial complex can not be trust.
Have warrant canaries at least shed any light here? It seems companies eagerly hosted them only for them to fall silent soon thereafter. Which, if accurate implies they have received warrants in short order.
We can only see the profile photo, which we obviously couldn't match in our worldwide facial recognition platform which automatically tags every picture of yours.
Since they ID you by telephone number then they need at least the phone numbers in your contact list to let you know if people on your phone are using the service. I agree that step should be optional though and allow you to manually put in someone else's phone number and never need WA to rifle through your contacts.
That sounds like a canned response carefully prepared by a lawyer (if indeed it's repeated word-by-word which I can't check due to Spiegel's lack of privacy options). I guess the privacy invasion comes in via linking to Fb and graphs of who's-messaging-whom.
Wonder what the alternatives are? I'm no expert and might be completely wrong but my assessment re usual suspects goes like this: Telegram? No E2E! Signal? Ceased to update their self-hosting software! Matrix: not a really open protocol to begin with!
Over ten years ago, XMPP used to work just fine (and IRC before that) so I'm just wondering why we have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Messaging isn't exactly rocket science.
I won't tie my online presence to a proprietary vendor with no alternative clients and service providers since that's strictly worse than what we have today. Remember WhatsApp started like those other providers but then got acquired by Fb.
For the record XMPP worked 10 years ago, and continues to work today (of course it has changed a lot).
If you have Android contacts then Quicksy is on the app store and an easy jump from WhatsApp, with the benefits of an open federated network. I believe iOS is planned, but in the meantime Siskin is a decent choice.
There is a lot of development activity going on in XMPP across a very wide range of projects, and I'm hopeful that as people realize that all this centralization onto single providers has been a recipe for abuse of power, that open networks may gather more public interest.
Matrix is very much an open protocol. Just because the team who created it works together professionally doesn’t somehow make it less open, given we set up the Foundation to keep it neutral. (And the fact our jobs depend on it being successful acts a useful motivator not to screw it up).
> WhatsApp CEO: I am worried by another surveillance law that Germany plans to pass that could force messenger apps and email providers to actively help government agencies to smuggle malware onto the devices of their customers.
> Der Spiegel: The government says it needs this technology to read messages from terrorists at a point before they are encrypted on their phone. What’s wrong with that?
Maybe Der Spiegel is asking the question simply to elicit the interviewee's opinion. But it strikes me as very strange that a German paper aimed at a German audience would be asking why citizens need protection from government surveillance. Germans are possibly the most privacy conscious folks in the world because of a history of invasive government surveillance.
I’m not sure how much this is still the case. The government has been massively pushing mass surveillance during the last few years, all under the „terrorists“ and „child abusers“ and almost everyone outside my privacy/tech bubble is in favor of it
What if the next German is going to use that information to map out certain groups of people to send them to camps? Did Germans not learn? This development is extremely troubling.
Der Spiegel likes their rights to be an independent news source (press) but they don't seem to care about other people's rights to privacy based on boogey men like terrorists. THere are other ways to find those guys, you don't have to hoover up 100% of everyone's communications to be able to do that.
1:1 conversations continue to be e2e and will forever be (allegedly).
Communicating with a business will not be e2e, per their new TOS.
Simple “Privacy nutrition labels”, like apple recently introduced in the App Store are a neat idea, but because they are self reported and not standardized they can do more harm than good. Eg it’s not clear from the labels that WhatsApp is e2e for personal comms while telegram isn’t by default and never for groups.
WhatsApp confirms they keep some of your personal data including phone numbers from your address book but doesn’t currently share that with Facebook.
But they do send recent messages when you report someone.
> Once reported, WhatsApp receives the most recent messages sent to you by a reported user or group, as well as information on your recent interactions with the reported user.
The CEO of WhatsApp says
- continues to say the whole controversy around the new TOS is fake news
- WhatsApp are still growing
- Does not like privacy labels because they are confusing due to each app defining what they put on it (example given: you can't tell from them that Telegram doesn't have E2E but WhatsApp does)
- Does not like that the German Government wants them to actively help the police track criminals, including silently installing malware on their phone.
- Is against weaking their own encryption for the government.
They are growing in users but dropping in usage. No one is deleting a whatapps account, most will delete the app and not use anymore. That allows the ceo to say we are growing. Is usage growing?
I am sorry but this is bull, has been bull and continues to be bull.
If you actually read the PP and TOS, you see that:
1. Nothing you share (content, pictures etc.) will be VISIBLE on Facebook for others to see (literally what they say), but it is pretty clear that this does not include what facebook does with the data aka sell it for ads.
This is the only absolute protection that the PP/TOS affords you. They promise not the go an post your pictures or locations on some random facebook profile. That's it.
2. Naturally, they say that CURRENTLY do not share "sensitive" data with facebook for ad purposes. To quote:
"Today, Facebook does not use your WhatsApp account information to improve your Facebook product experiences or provide you more relevant Facebook ad experiences on Facebook."
But what about tomorrow? Why this wording, which appears several times in the PP/TOS?
The intention of this PP is clearly to pave the way to use Whatsapp to enrich the ad targeting in Facebooks network. This was always the goal for Facebook, and they will fight tooth and nail to get that done.
So where do we stand?
You can accept the TOS/PP, allowing Facebook to do all the nefarious things it wants, simply because Whatsapp tells you that currently, "today", your data is safe. But you explicitly allow them to do all sorts of things.
To wit, they also tell us (less prominently) that they will immediately share all data with facebook once an agreement with the Irish government is reached. However, even without that, you can count on them doing so if profit > fine.
Beyond all the bull that has been produced by FB and Whatsapp, the reality is obviously that the singular goal of this entire exercise is to syphon off as much data from Whatsapp as they can get away with, relative to the fines they will have to pay.
This is very troubling "Messages that are highly forwarded can only be forwarded to one chat since last spring. That led to a drop in 70 percent of these messages. More recently, we are additionally showing you a link to the Google search on those messages, to let you check the facts directly." Earlier he claims they cannot read messages but somehow they can filter out the RNA spam? It makes no sense. What am I missing?
I haven't seen it in action, but it possibly works on the client-side like link previews, by constructing a Google search URL with the decrypted contents of the highly forwarded message after the message is received on your phone, and leave it up to you to click it.
>DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?
>Cathcart: It’s true that we do have some information about how people use WhatsApp and that we do know, for example, the device ID. We collect this only to secure our services and protect from attacks. When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name.
In particular, they have (meta)data regarding specific messages being sent, as evidenced by their approach to curtailing misinformation:
>Cathcart: Messages that are highly forwarded can only be forwarded to one chat since last spring. That led to a drop in 70 percent of these messages. More recently, we are additionally showing you a link to the Google search on those messages, to let you check the facts directly.
I'm not sure how easy it is to figure out whether those 'highly forwarded messages' are all the same, or somehow link them without knowing anything about their content or linking them to information you already know about people. Maybe it's easy and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, I don't know.
> I'm not sure how easy it is to figure out whether those 'highly forwarded messages' are all the same, or somehow link them without knowing anything about their content or linking them to information you already know about people.
They use a counter. I don't know, however, if it is enforced on only client side or it is in a unencrypted metadata which can be checked on server side.
> Forwarded messages contain a counter that keeps track of how many times a message is forwarded. [1]
I was thinking the same thing. I believe the use a hash but surely each hash would be different if they were encrypted with different public/private keys?
I am pretty sure they are using hashes to stop the child exploitation from being spread on WhatsApp.
The points about e2e encryption deflects from the bigger problem - the parent company FB's user-hostile track record with privacy, their constant flip-flopping on privacy settings and policies, and their consistent pattern of unethical behaviours.
While we are debating the pros and cons of WhatsApp's policy update, I can bet anything we will see more user hostile policy changes, data sharing, data mining and exploitation in future, because this is the business model of the parent company. It makes no sense to not exploit the gold mine of metadata and personally identifiable information if that's the foundation of your business model.
At this point, I don't even mind using vanilla SMS compared to WhatsApp or FB messenger since it's my telco who's doing the data collection, and the telco is governed by a different and far stricter legislation in my country.
To solve this problem, they provided a Docker stack that would essentially spin up a specialised WhatsApp Client on the customer’s infrastructure - so you’d be running the API locally, send and receive messages in your own network, and the client would handle encryption before transmitting to the WhatsApp servers. All containers would connect to a local SQL database to store their data, and included a REST API (curiously written in PHP). To handle high load, you had to spin up more images in distinct patterns and configure sharding per stack.
This was a nice, albeit highly technical solution to the problem. As WhatsApp partners we built lots and lots of additional infrastructure to manage 12000 individual Docker-Compose stacks in a distributed, reliable way. That worked surprisingly well, but obviously is way too complex. So in the end WhatsApp concluded it would be easier to take care of the container hosting themselves, shoving them into AWS, integrated with the Facebook business manager. And all this lead to a necessary change in the terms of service, as WhatsApp hosting containers in AWS opened the possibility of e2e no longer being given.