this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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They already are.
I don't think so. Metadata is unencrypted (i.e. your contacts, who sends messages to whom and how often and when).
Messages itself are encrypted.
Am I wrong?
That is what the article is explaining. The contact names and details are encrypted.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/10/22/security/ipls-privacy-preserving-storage-for-your-whatsapp-contacts/
Perhaps the call times are exposed but it seems it would be difficult or impossible for them to connect this with a human identity.
Use Signal if you have concerns about WhatsApp.
Thanks.
The planned improvements are a good thing. I thought we talked about the status right/ until now.
Also: What does it mean then Meta (the company) isn't eager to collect this data (anymore)? This doesn't fit my world view of this company.
Meta acquired WhatsApp and somehow hasn’t messed it up yet. WhatsApp has always been fairly good with privacy and doesn’t share much with other Meta apps as far as I’m aware.
Where is the evidence of Meta mining WhatsApp metadata?
Here WhatsApp spells out what it shares with Meta:
https://faq.whatsapp.com/1303762270462331
WhatsApp is a Meta business unit, yes.
And it has its own rules and policies for what is shared with other Meta business units.
Google has spell out the same. Just because you provide data like location to one Google service doesn’t automatically mean every other Google service can access it.
And they can’t just change their internal data policies however they like as some of this is governed by legal regulations.
Here’s a a story about how Google is not allowed to share data across business units without user consent, at least in the EU.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036312/google-digital-markets-act-services-user-data-opt-out
I guess that's right. Although I'm (most likely) not a person of interest for any secret service. But the data could be interesting for marketing and insurance companies.
Is that really how it works? I thought signal protocol was about just how the encryption worked, not what is encrypted?
and yet the only thing they provide upon a court request is the last time you were online and the date you created your account https://signal.org/bigbrother/
The server doesn't need to know or keep track of who's sending a message to deliver it. If you don't trust signal to not lie to the court about not collecting such metadata, I can't convince you otherwise. But there's a merit in designing your system so that such collection is as hard as possible.
Are you're familiar with how singal's servers work? Even I can think of a system where all messages are collected in a common pool before being distributed, the actual security researchers that made signal surely thought of something better.
How does FISA make it legal for singal to lie to a court about what information they have? Please enlighten me
They cannot see phone numbers of contacts, no.
Is the code open ?
No. The Signal app offers similar functionality to WhatsApp core features and is open.
Of course not. And the often repeated "they use Signal protocol" means diddly squat because the code is closed source. They took Signal protocol at some point, forked it and did good knows what with it since experts cannot review it. 🙄