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Note that everyone's favourite privacy-respecting app (mine too!), Signal, also does contacts-sharing, although it doesn't do friends discovery (so the server k
by wtbob 10y ago
Note that everyone's favourite privacy-respecting app (mine too!), Signal, also does contacts-sharing, although it doesn't do friends discovery (so the server knows one's contacts, but one's contacts don't). If Open Whisper Systems wanted to be evil, though, they could do this form of analysis.
Back in March I laid out how they could use a private set intersection protocol to enable any pair of users to privately share their contacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 (I'm not posting this to shame them or something: March wasn't that long ago for developing a feature like this, and of course it's open source; I could develop it myself and submit it to them).
I think it's something they care about; they've just not found a solution they're comfortable with yet.
- laktak 10y ago> I think it's something they care about so did you get a reply?
- wtbob 10y ago> so did you get a reply? No, I've not. If I wanted to brush up on my Java, I'd take a look at submitting a PR. But Java is the opposite of fun.
- glitcher 10y agoYet another daunting issue in our modern world: No matter how good a given company or product is at privacy-respecting, what happens to all that data if they are bought out by someone else?
- wtbob 10y agoWell, that's the good thing about PIR — with the protocol I discussed, OWS wouldn't have access to one's list of contacts. They'd still know with whom one spoke (anonymising that is a hard problem), but at least they wouldn't know everyone one knows.