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“Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”
- swampthinker 8y ago"We don't know what you're writing, but we know who you're talking to! We love encryption now!"
- Zhyl 8y agoThe title seems to suggest an announcement but the article is essentially speculation. Sure, it's likely that Facebook will exploit the mega-chatosphere for its data in the same way it currently does with each service individually (and cross service if you count account linkage). However, this article is essentially sensationalism for the sake of plugging their own privacy focused chat app. I suggest the title be renamed to something less official sounding.
- sctb 8y agoSure thing, we've taken a stab at it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vermontdevil 8y agoIt’s not an article. It’s a “roll up” of a thread by Sarah Jamie Lewis as you can see here https://twitter.com/sarahjamielewis/status/1088914192847917056?s=21 https://twitter.com/sarahjamielewis/status/10889141928479170...
- thekyle 8y agoThat makes more sense. I was wondering why the article was so "all over the place", it's just because every sentence was actually a separate tweet.
- riazrizvi 8y agoSurveillance on the general public is bought by employers/businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA/FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom. The USA has long aspired to be a place of outstanding liberty; to run your own business, to say what you want, to own what you want, and in a less corrupt landscape relative to the rest of the world. With its lead in citizen surveillance it is fast becoming the opposite.
- Mirioron 8y agoThe problem with the FBI/NSA mining their communication "for criminal activity" is that they probably don't do it exclusively for that. After Snowden we found out that sometimes NSA employees would use this snooping to stalk people they wanted to be in a relationship with, spy on their neighbors and other such unsavory things.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agoAnd even if it was solely for criminal activity it would still not be good. After all a lot of victimless "crimes" were, are, and will be illegal in a lot of countries.
- est31 8y agoThey also do economic espionage on europe.
- riazrizvi 8y agoThis happens yes. When I send my tax returns in the mail directly to the IRS, even if months late, the same week I start getting scam calls. So someone in the IRS sells that data. Though I doubt it is on an industrial scale, more like bad actors within these organizations, so a small percentage. So I find articles about privacy that raise concerns about the NSA/FBI, have the effect of just deflecting and dampening where our concerns should be really focused.
- 8y ago
- tomnipotent 8y agoFUD with nothing but speculation, and a covert ad for their "Cwtch IM" program.
- avatarbl 8y agoBut don't they already know who you are talking to ?
- randomacct3847 8y agoI read another tech journalist twitter thread that hypothesized it was to make it harder for a regulator to break up the company because once combined it would be near impossible to break up without negatively impacting users.
- est31 8y agoSignal on the other hand has made eliminated their access to much of the metadata, including contact information [1] (using SGX sandboxes which is no perfect solution but better what Facebook has) and information about who has sent a specific message [2]. [1]: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [2]: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
- no_identd 8y ago"no perfect solution" indeed, a few examples: 1. https://twitter.com/BRIAN_____/status/1074541770782892032 https://twitter.com/BRIAN_____/status/1074541770782892032 2. https://foreshadowattack.eu/ https://foreshadowattack.eu/ 3. https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1085087004352602112 https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1085087004352602112 4. https://github.com/jovanbulck/sgx-step https://github.com/jovanbulck/sgx-step Any many more. SGX is a hamfisted pseudo-solution better solved properly by going to the roots of the nightmare landscape of trust issues: http://bootstrappable.org/ http://bootstrappable.org/ http://langsec.org/occupy/ http://langsec.org/occupy/ We need fully bootstrapping libre hardware avoiding the trusting trust problem YESTERDAY. If we had that, this entire load of problems would disappear and becomes one of cryptographically certified agent-to-agent, end-to-end trust provenance attesting. The entire concept of a "compromisable system" only exists because we let the industry get away with closed hardware bullshit and because we put our fingers in our ears and go "LALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU" whenever someone brings up the trusting trust problem. I suspect we do that because it, for quite a while now, has let us avoid confronting the age old philosophical questioning of the risks & uncertainties of inter- & intrapersonal placement & position of trust & doubt. Quite similar to how philosophers tend to pack up and run away screaming any time someone brings up the Münchhausen trilemma, because, to quote rationalwiki: "it breaks the legs of philosophy, science, and any other possible approach to reality."
- est31 8y agoI mostly agree, but note that the contact discovery problem is a bit tough to solve without an SGX-like solution: https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/
- m_ke 8y agoIt will also make it easier for them to take your FB profile and run targeted ads on whatsapp using it.
- akerro 8y agoNo surprises here.
- nobody271 8y agoFacebook encrypted messaging! What's next, military intelligence? How about a vegan big-mac? Maybe a quality automobile by GM? I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I'm surprised it isn't already widely used. Let's see: - easy to recognize but hard to detect - can pass through any channel that accepts images - massive storage capacity (10MB+ depending on how you roll) - encryption easily baked in! - many additional use cases (store your kids ssc or passwords, store encrypted notes, anonymous communication by just posting an image online somewhere). Everyone should know Facebook encryption is about as good as free (or maybe most) VPN encryption. But with steganography all you need is an open source application that you can trust or a popular codec. If anyone is interested I have a stalled steganography project that I'm waiting to get back to (once I finish a ASP.NET Core book) https://github.com/smchughinfo/steganographyjr https://github.com/smchughinfo/steganographyjr. I'm making it as easy to use as possible (UWP, iOS, Android, a website, Web API, Nuget, and possibly a native app for Debian if I get the time) Most of that work, though, you get for free with .NET Standard + Xamarin but it's still a lot of work.
- ams6110 8y agoWhy not just post ASCII armored gpg messages on pastebin?
- nobody271 8y agoI suppose you could and I am certainly no expert so it might even be better that way. A couple cons to that are that it looks cryptic so it's a little easier to detect, that you have to share the URL somehow (as opposed to hanging out in usersub on imgur), it's usually more difficult to deal with large amounts of raw text than an image, and if you use PGP instead of AES->base64 (or something like that) you would have to know the recievers key. I guess that last bit depends on the use case. I'm not saying either approach is better. Maybe one is better, I don't really know.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoIf you're going to go that route using Pidgin with OTR would make more sense.
- mondo9000 8y agoThe Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft. Doesn't it feel weird that there used to be positive facebook stories, but now its all negative 24/7?
- jjoonathan 8y agoSounds to me like the hivemind woke up. Isn't that a good thing?
- wilkskyes 8y agoI think Facebook outrage is more justified than past grievances. What exactly was the outrage toward Microsoft back then? A company trying to make money? Preposterous!
- ams6110 8y agoPart of that is just what happens when you go from small start-up to entrenched big player. I remember when PayPal started. It was so cool and everyone who understood what it was was very enthused about it. Now it's all gripes and complaints.
- eitland 8y ago> I remember when PayPal started. It was so cool and everyone who understood what it was was very enthused about it. Now it's all gripes and complaints. Not what I see here on HN: I see complaints from merchants (mostly with legitimate issues it seems) and praise from end users.
- bartread 8y agoI actually used to hate PayPal as an end user because, used relatively infrequently, they'd often block or delay transactions, causing me headaches and wasting my time. They felt like they were actively trying to hinder rather than help commerce. They do seem to have improved in the last couple of years though.
- deleted 8y ago
- Havoc 8y agoI don't think this is really gonna change much. Or really it's just going from bad to bad.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- craftyguy 8y agoIt's really annoying how so much facebook 'news' and conspiracy theory makes it to the front page of HN. I hereby propose renaming Hacker News to Facebook News. Edit: there's no way that this comment is any more off topic that the vast majority of the facebook crap posted here.
- djohnston 8y agopeople are growing weary of the media's desperate narrative.
- djohnston 8y agomaybe trump paved the way for twitter posts to become leading news, but this is hardly more than a rando on the internet speculating. whatever it takes to keep that narrative up i guess
- remarkEon 8y agoGuys, just delete your Facebook. One of the underrated benefits is not bothering to read articles like this because it doesn't effect you ... since you deleted your Facebook.
- stevenicr 8y agoI wish it was that easy. What other people do on fbook and whatsapp and messenger does affect me. I need articles and discussions like this so I can try to educate those who use those services. If I could somehow make it so fbook would auto remove my name from any messages, delete any pictures with me uploaded by anyone, and ignore (not store) my name and phone number when it takes the contacts off of friends phones for example . Do not store the location of my residence if one of my friends is messaging their "whatever" from my place. I don't want to be associated with location sharing of whatever people are doing on their phone. - I'd gladly file whatever 'right to be forgotten / never known' request with fbook. In the meantime, we need to know as much as possible as to what this beast is doing with data.
- doublepg23 8y agoCan someone fill me in on why people are upset Facbook will be consolidating DMs/PMs accross services - using E2E? I've went other the past news releases, it seems to be a good thing to me.
- apozem 8y ago"They will make money by tracking your relationships and social groups. They will make that information easily accessible to law enforcement. They will build the largest surveillance system ever conceived and will sell it under the banner of consumer encryption."
- doublepg23 8y agoBut they're already doing that? If I could snap my fingers and everyone would switch to Matrix [1] I would, but as it stands hundreds of millions of people use these services daily and getting them more privacy will be useful. [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- chronid 8y agoThey probably can already do everything you say, eg: cross reference and internally "trade" (meta)data between facebook, instagram and whatsapp backends and deliver that to law enforcement. I'm pretty sure their ability to do analytics is advanced enough (though even technical people sometimes really overestimate how "good" those big companies are at it). At least at that point they will not have the contents of your messages. Which now they do (with the exception of whatsapp).
- bassman9000 8y agoMetadata + Countries where Rule Of Law doesn't apply + "Law" Enforcement requests E.g. Middle East countries
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoYou get what E2E encryption is, right?
- xivxix 8y agoThis article specifically talks about sex workers using whatsapp and the fact that because of meta data sharing, IF a warrant comes from the government to find users associated with a certain group (such as sex workers groups) on Facebook, it indirectly brings whatsapp users into that group as well through indirect means. Interesting issue yet so many "if"s. The reality is that Facebook needs to make money from whatsapp at some point. If keeping end to end message encryption is important, then they are left with three equally bad options: # Charge for the service (whatsapp will lose 90% of its userbase in a month) # Show generic ads (worse value than even TV ads, because at least TV ads know a little bit about the viewers of a certain show but whatsapp has no idea) # Figure out a way to deliver targeted ads.
- bassman9000 8y ago1- Charge for the service (whatsapp will lose 90% of its userbase in a month) Why? Whatsapp used to charge a yearly fee for the app.
- FuckOffNeemo 8y agoFor $1 I'd agree most of the user base would commit to paying it too.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI wonder how much that covers how much they spend on the infrastructure to run WhatsApps backend services. If its even profitable.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- FuckOffNeemo 8y agoThe infrastructure wouldn't be much more than Signals, surely?
- 8y ago
- vacocake 8y agoYou trust Facebook ? Skip it bin it and forget
- arthurcolle 8y agoLiterally exactly what they said they wouldn't do. I gotta get off Facebook stat
- xenihn 8y ago>Don't you know that our plans have your interests -- not ours -- in mind? Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations?