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Another angle on this is we have no way to know what is changed in each WhatsApp version. There could be APIs its hitting that leak data, private keys could be

Another angle on this is we have no way to know what is changed in each WhatsApp version. There could be APIs its hitting that leak data, private keys could be getting exported at the behest of a government, etc Commoners have no transparency if Facebook is data mining who they talk to, how often, what type of content and for how long. From the anecdata we have, we know some of this metadata is being mined (contacts at this point).

ptx 8y ago
Are they claiming that contacts are metadata and not data? In that case in seems those framing the debate in terms of "metadata" have already reached the second phase: 1) Claim that no data is harvested, only unimportant metadata that you shouldn't be concerned about, so there is no need to worry! 2) Gradually expand the definition of "metadata" to include all desired data.
- loup-vaillant 8y ago
  I've always understood timing, origin, and destination of a message to be metadata. I'm on the fence about the size of the message. Only the contents themselves are definitely data. Of course, metadata sometimes contains even more information than the data itself, so framing it as "unimportant" is already incredibly dishonest.
  - xt00 8y ago
    I think the open question is how does Facebook make money and justify their expensive purchase of WhatsApp? It still seems to be an open question years after the acquisition.. i think it is fair to bring up that if Facebook wanted to maybe “parse and target” WhatsApp messages they could and also make the statement that they are encrypted end to end. It does make me chuckle a bit though that there is some debate about if zuck can be assumed to be forthright or not.. the frontline episode about Facebook definitely sort of makes you realize that Facebook and mark zuckerberg at least for a long time thought the world needed to catch up to their super smarter than everybody thinking and hey if there are consequences eh that’s the natural course of things..
    - crtasm 8y ago
      News from a couple weeks ago was they will start showing adverts in the status feature.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    I would think the dishonesty is in the assumption that data and metadata are disjoint. Metadata is simply a kind of data--but it's still data. It's just a kind of data that is particularly difficult to hide--but that obviously has no bearing whatsoever on whether it contains important information.
  - lozf 8y ago
    I'd be surprised if they're not logging the amount of data used (size of message), probably also it's type (voice or video call, or just text - possibly with some sort of attachment), not to mention location data for each participant, and whatever else they can glean - frequency of calls/messages between users for instance, and how that relates to other data FB know about - all sites visited that have social media buttons, as well as what anyone posts directly to their feed.
maxerickson 8y ago
There are people actively analyzing the differences between binaries (they are able to characterize all sorts of things, not just whether there are changes, they do it for all apps in the big app stores). That doesn't really help Joe User, but it's possible to do it.
UncleMeat 8y ago
Of course there is. Reading and understanding bytecode isn't hard. Lots of people do that for a living.

ptx 8y ago

Are they claiming that contacts are metadata and not data? In that case in seems those framing the debate in terms of "metadata" have already reached the second phase: 1) Claim that no data is harvested, only unimportant metadata that you shouldn't be concerned about, so there is no need to worry! 2) Gradually expand the definition of "metadata" to include all desired data.

loup-vaillant 8y ago
I've always understood timing, origin, and destination of a message to be metadata. I'm on the fence about the size of the message. Only the contents themselves are definitely data. Of course, metadata sometimes contains even more information than the data itself, so framing it as "unimportant" is already incredibly dishonest.
- xt00 8y ago
  I think the open question is how does Facebook make money and justify their expensive purchase of WhatsApp? It still seems to be an open question years after the acquisition.. i think it is fair to bring up that if Facebook wanted to maybe “parse and target” WhatsApp messages they could and also make the statement that they are encrypted end to end. It does make me chuckle a bit though that there is some debate about if zuck can be assumed to be forthright or not.. the frontline episode about Facebook definitely sort of makes you realize that Facebook and mark zuckerberg at least for a long time thought the world needed to catch up to their super smarter than everybody thinking and hey if there are consequences eh that’s the natural course of things..
  - crtasm 8y ago
    News from a couple weeks ago was they will start showing adverts in the status feature.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  I would think the dishonesty is in the assumption that data and metadata are disjoint. Metadata is simply a kind of data--but it's still data. It's just a kind of data that is particularly difficult to hide--but that obviously has no bearing whatsoever on whether it contains important information.
- lozf 8y ago
  I'd be surprised if they're not logging the amount of data used (size of message), probably also it's type (voice or video call, or just text - possibly with some sort of attachment), not to mention location data for each participant, and whatever else they can glean - frequency of calls/messages between users for instance, and how that relates to other data FB know about - all sites visited that have social media buttons, as well as what anyone posts directly to their feed.

maxerickson 8y ago

There are people actively analyzing the differences between binaries (they are able to characterize all sorts of things, not just whether there are changes, they do it for all apps in the big app stores). That doesn't really help Joe User, but it's possible to do it.

UncleMeat 8y ago

Of course there is. Reading and understanding bytecode isn't hard. Lots of people do that for a living.