8 ms·

Privacy critique of WhatsApp

bristleworm 7y ago
Some valid points there. The problem, for me at least and I guess many other people, is that the vast majority of my contacts uses WhatsApp. I know this probably will never happen, but what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use. Back in the late 90s there were plenty of internet messengers such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, and IIRC it wasn't long before universal clients were developed.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  I've heard that one before. All my contacts are on msn. On skype. On myspace. On facebook. Now on whatsapp. It will change. The only things that haven't up to now are postal addresses, emails and phone numbers.
  - lmz 7y ago
    Will the replacement be any better in this regard though?
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      It depends on us. If we choose things mainly because "all my friends are on it", then no. I don't have a fb account. I don't have whatsapp. Never had. Yet I have a very rich social life and maintain relationship with people far away. The tools we use are a choice. The price we pay is different depending on that choice.
      - heartbeats 7y ago
        Chicken and the egg. If you're sufficiently close to people to convince them to use SMS/Signal/Matrix/whatever with you, then sure, you'll be fine. But what if you're not? What if it's either "install WhatsApp and join our group chat" or nothing?
        BiteCode_dev 7y ago
        I don't. Everybody got a phone number, sms and email. So if we don't share a tool, I fall back to that, to face to face, accept a delay or be left out of the loop. The secret is to focus on quality, not quantity, and realize a lot of FOMO is involved.
        heartbeats 7y ago
        If the quantity is zero, the quality doesn't matter - if the alternative to joining the group is to be left out of the loop, there is practically no choice. For example, if they write - in the group - that the next meeting is 3 PM next Wednesday at so-and-so, unless you happen to run into them at that specific time your chances of knowing this are slim.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I ended up getting a Microsoft mail account because it was the only way (for us) to respond to customers who used MS's email. So email isn't immune from walling off of gardens either.
    - 72deluxe 7y ago
      That sounds wrong. Is your DMARC / DKIM / SPF set up wrong for your email provider or something? Are you constantly marked as spam?
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        It was a couple years ago now, SPF and DMARC (but not DKIM iirc) were sorted. At the time MS used a third party who you could pay to get "vetted", I got a response that the problem was our server host's had another IP (not the one our emails were sent from) that had once had spam sent from it. So the facts we were responding to customer emails, that our domain had ~12 years of good behaviour, and our email servers IP being clean weren't enough. Even "whitelisting" the domain from the Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com end didn't work. I'm still smarting, we still sometimes have problems (from a different host now) but just resend via an outlook.com address and it's fine. So, no never had our domain marked as spam on any dbl that I've checked (but only done that sporadically). We also had a blip with Gmail around the same time (but not the exact same time), but I reported it as a false positive and it was fixed in a few days; no problems since. We were/are sending so few emails (<1 day average) that it's not worth me spending a couple of days trying to see through the murk of MS to fix it. We're probably not losing any revenue, just have to treat MS sent emails differently to everyone else's. Sounds wrong to me too ;o)
        72deluxe 7y ago
        That's a pity. I wonder how you ever get off some organisation's bad lists!
- zambal 7y ago
  If you have a server available, have some time and don't mind fiddling with some config files, you could install a Matrix homeserver. Matrix is a relatively new open source message protocol that offers various bridges to connect to other chat/messenger services: https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
- vthriller 7y ago
  > what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use There is (was?) plenty of said messengers; Trillian, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium to name a few, plus XMPP transports that could be used from any Jabber client. I've no idea though whether they're still around and play nice with modern walled gardens that require registration by phone no.
- neuronic 7y ago
  For desktop, but it might be useful nonetheless: https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/
  - Kaze404 7y ago
    I used Franz a while back but dropped it because if performance issues. Since it uses the web version of the apps it supports, the performance was just abysmal (most notably on Discord). It's a neat idea that doesn't work very well in practice unfortunately.
ReptileMan 7y ago
Soo just like any other messenger app ever? All the drawbacks are shared. It is not only whatsapp. The idea that with a social graph and metadata you can abuse stuff is hardly novel.
- bilekas 7y ago
  Not exactly, and its a bit ignorant to claim that.. Storing that amount of information for extended period of time, cataloging it under your identifiable information was not done by all messenger apps. If I leave a WhatsApp group immediately after I don't like what was posted, the data will still reference me. That's not great. It doesn't need to be permenant. Thats kinda the point.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  > Soo just like any other messenger app ever? No, not at all.
izacus 7y ago
No, WhatsApp is not a dumpster fire. It might be a dumpster fire in ONE aspect the some of people care about, but: It is also one of the most responsive messengers out there. It's also one of the rare messengers what are reliable also on 2G and other very slow and spotty networks. It's also one of the rare messengers that includes video calls, voice calls and mutiple other features that make communication easy. It supports groups, invitations via links and multiple other features that make coordination of communities easy and seamless. And it also doesn't lose all your messaging history everytime your phone breaks. Privacy crowd needs to start understanding this and needs to stop behaving like robots who don't understand WHY people use these apps although they might be "dumpster fire" in that one privacy aspect. And then move to fix Signal and other to make sure they're not "dumpster fire" in aspects the wide users actually care about.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Almost all of the features you mentioned are orthogonal to privacy; and in fact, other messaging clients have them, generally. As for keeping your messages - that is a trade-off between convenience and privacy. When people are aware of how their emails are being read, processed and used for spying they often (usually?) choose the privacy option.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    I know many people that are well aware that google has access to their emails, all of them still use gmail. not sure who these people who usually choose privacy but I have yet to meet them.
    - einpoklum 7y ago
      I'm not sure they are "well aware". Many of us have been told that, once or twice, so we're aware on some level, but we don't have the image in our mind the image of some person in the government being able to essentially sit at our mailbox and read our impolite, hateful or lewd messages.
- JakeDavis 7y ago
davidweatherall 7y ago
I don't see an issue here at all. I don't think anyone expects whatsapp to be a super privacy focused app? There are plenty of alternative messenger apps that are privacy focused if that's your requirements. I strongly believe if you asked the majority of users with an engineering background if they thought whatsapp kept a log of "all your contacts and group names, past and present, covering multiple phones you've connected to the account, plus your account info" - they would say yes. These seem like pretty normal things for a messenger app that's focused on UX rather than security to store?
- JakeDavis 7y ago
  Most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app. Not everyone reads Hacker News and knows the basics of this sector. They are mostly bamboozled by the E2E encryption argument and fail to see the rest.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > You're wrong - most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app. How do you know this to be true? > I feel like you just read the first tweet in a seven part thread and came to a weird conclusion based on an argument that was never made that way. Why are you being so snarky to anyone who disagrees with you in this thread?
    - JakeDavis 7y ago
      I give regular public talks on this matter and ask entire audiences these questions. Most people do think WhatsApp is sort of vaguely more secure than say SMS or Skype and are surprised to learn that it's more complex than E2E encryption. Most people also aren't aware of Edward Snowden beyond just a name in a newspaper. I'm not being snarky, just direct (kind of typing these fast to talk to as many folks who are interested as possible) , sorry if it came across badly to you, that wasn't the intention
      - jamespo 7y ago
dirtydroog 7y ago
The amusing thing is that he complained about this on Twitter. Twitter... the 4chan of messaging.
- JakeDavis 7y ago
  Hi I'm the OP of this thread. It's not a complaint at all, it's just awareness raising. This stuff is really obvious. Twitter is a tool used by the masses so why not use it to educate and inform.
- whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  Doesn't Twitter do the same thing? When you sign up for an account these days if you don't hand over your phone number in sign up it claims your account is a spam account within an hour even if you haven't posted yet. Always presumed it was a basic way to collate alt-accounts to real people in the back end.
skrebbel 7y ago
I think titles like this are actively harmful. WhatsApp is the only mainstream messaging platform that uses proper end-to-end encryption by default. From what I've understood, it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. Sure, it's still not perfect. But to casual readers, it's totally not obvious that if WhatsApp is a "dumpster fire", all popular alternatives except Signal and Matrix and the likes are a nuclear disaster. Nobody at WhatsApp claims that it's good for overthrowing your government. But if I want to send a password to my sister without having her install an app, just to satisfy her brother's tin foil hat, I think WhatsApp is a much better choice than every other option I have readily available. We should stop driving people from somewhat secure tools towards insecure tools.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  > From what I've understood, it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. you forgot WeChat, which is also pretty secure provided that you trust the CCP. > We should stop driving people from somewhat secure tools towards insecure tools. you think that Signal is an insecure tool when compared to WhatsApp?
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    > you think that Signal is an insecure tool when compared to WhatsApp? Signal is pretty secure, but Moxie's "The Ecosystem Is Moving" is the wrong mindset. Email is only still alive because anyone* can run their own with their own settings. * including companies and individuals
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    No, but a non security geek will not, when reading a headline calling WhatsApp a dumpster fire, think of moving to Signal. They'll likely move to eg Telegram.
- est31 7y ago
  > it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. At least hear out what the Telegram devs have to say about this: > WhatsApp aggressively pushes users to enable backups to third-party services by Apple and Google. Even if you don't backup your messages, it is extremely likely that your chat partners are doing so. It is likely that they don‘t even remember dismissing an annoying notification with a “yes” a long time ago. The interface provides no way of knowing whether or not your messages are being backed up. Meanwhile, for group chats of five members, there’s a 99% probability that all messages are stored on Apple‘s or Google’s servers in the US. > As Product Manager Randall Sarafa put it, just one month after Google Drive backups were introduced to Whatsapp: > “About 75% of Whatsapp users are on Android, and of our Android users, we have about 40% of them opted into Google Drive backups today. That will likely continue to increase over time, as people get prompted.” https://telegra.ph/whatsapp-backdoor-01-16 https://telegra.ph/whatsapp-backdoor-01-16 So Whatsapp's usage of end to end encryption might not be as helpful as advertised. I suggest you use Signal or Threema instead of apps like Whatsapp or Telegram. Both lack options to back up to the cloud.
ailideex 7y ago
WhatsApp is certainly not the least tolerable of all the dumpster fires that are the IM apps that exist today. I really like the ideas behind matrix.org but that is a dumpster fire of epic proportion.
fyrefoxboy12 7y ago
pretty misleading title. not exactly clickbiat, since it provides some "dumpster fire" aspects, but leaving the title like this alone makes it seem that, in its totality, it is a dumpster fire.
tdons 7y ago
I'd like to stop using WhatsApp but it's complicated. The foothold it has over here in Europe (The Netherlands) is enormous. Everybody uses it, there's even neighbourhood watches that use it, see: https://cdn.nieuws.nl/media/sites/305/2015/12/05153708/attentie-whatsapp-buurtpreventie.jpg https://cdn.nieuws.nl/media/sites/305/2015/12/05153708/atten... Any advice? Just pull the plug and pay the social cost?
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  use Signal or Wire and get those you care about to use it too. assumes that you're able to live with the fact that those who don't migrate with you will be unable to messange you. I went through this by uninstalling WhatsApp (when I deleted FB) and informed everyone about it. Many agreed to install Signal and have grown to like it. Many of them I had to help during the process and keep them using it by updating them about security bugs and posts about the benefits and the growing popularity of Signal (such as this one https://www.politico.eu/pro/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to-signal-messaging-app/ https://www.politico.eu/pro/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to...). Some didn't migrate, but they are still able to reach me via email. I'm OK with that outcome of having lost some of those who didn't care.
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  Yep! I'm not on it and never have been (I've been through all the IM systems over the years - MSN, ICQ, IRC, Skype, Hangouts, GChat, GTalk, AIM Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, iMessage literally used every single one, forced to use the memory hog Slack at work) and thought I didn't want to jump on the next bandwagon since SMS fills 99.9% of my needs, and if not, just email me. Turns out that people don't bother communicating with you if you're on SMS, and can never be bothered to write an email. This implies that the communication they were going to send is not important. If it were, they'd write an email. And people don't like the cost of MMS and soon stop sending me stupid pictures. I can archive email + SMS, not any of the other chat systems. I hardly get bothered by any notifications or interruptions or silly photos unlike my wife's phone that is constantly binging and buzzing and silly comments from "family chats" and work chats eg. "lol rofl haha random internet picture" It's refreshingly quiet. If others can't be bothered to find a method to communicate with you, they can't be very sociable? Their friendship and social interaction with you seems to be tied to an app. That's not a social cost - that's a social price.
bArray 7y ago
Is the back-end of WhatsApp like the back-end of the Facebook and Messenger apps? I.e. loads of teams, lots of redundant code, massive attack surface, constantly breaking, etc?
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  their broken input sanitation suggests exactly that. e2ee is just a marketing gimmick if the system as a whole can easily be pawned in other ways. NSO, FinFisher and all the other players peddling exploits to low-ranking LE are having a field day with WhatsApp for reasons that have nothing to do with e2ee. WhatsApp is as much snake-oil as Telegram, and OP was right in calling it a dumpster fire.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Keep seeing people who are privacy focused complaining about apps that rely on phone numbers for sign up and identification. Honestly would think if you're concerned about that then handing over your phone number should be the last thing you're doing.
graynk 7y ago
Now, I hate WhatsApp as much as the next guy, but no matter how much I re-read this thread I can't see the issue for the life of me. Isn't it obvious it's doing all those things? Of course it stores all your groups, of course it syncs all your contacts: it explicitly asks for permission to do so.
ajconway 7y ago
To sum up, WhatsApp stores metadata that's required to run the service, and previous contacts and groups on top of that. The additional information is probably retained in order to fight spam (not an easy task in an end-to-end encrypted setting with more than one billion of users). Facebook may be evil, but not because of WhatsApp.

Some valid points there. The problem, for me at least and I guess many other people, is that the vast majority of my contacts uses WhatsApp. I know this probably will never happen, but what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use. Back in the late 90s there were plenty of internet messengers such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, and IIRC it wasn't long before universal clients were developed.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
I've heard that one before. All my contacts are on msn. On skype. On myspace. On facebook. Now on whatsapp. It will change. The only things that haven't up to now are postal addresses, emails and phone numbers.
- lmz 7y ago
  Will the replacement be any better in this regard though?
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    It depends on us. If we choose things mainly because "all my friends are on it", then no. I don't have a fb account. I don't have whatsapp. Never had. Yet I have a very rich social life and maintain relationship with people far away. The tools we use are a choice. The price we pay is different depending on that choice.
    - heartbeats 7y ago
      Chicken and the egg. If you're sufficiently close to people to convince them to use SMS/Signal/Matrix/whatever with you, then sure, you'll be fine. But what if you're not? What if it's either "install WhatsApp and join our group chat" or nothing?
      - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
        I don't. Everybody got a phone number, sms and email. So if we don't share a tool, I fall back to that, to face to face, accept a delay or be left out of the loop. The secret is to focus on quality, not quantity, and realize a lot of FOMO is involved.
        heartbeats 7y ago
        If the quantity is zero, the quality doesn't matter - if the alternative to joining the group is to be left out of the loop, there is practically no choice. For example, if they write - in the group - that the next meeting is 3 PM next Wednesday at so-and-so, unless you happen to run into them at that specific time your chances of knowing this are slim.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I ended up getting a Microsoft mail account because it was the only way (for us) to respond to customers who used MS's email. So email isn't immune from walling off of gardens either.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    That sounds wrong. Is your DMARC / DKIM / SPF set up wrong for your email provider or something? Are you constantly marked as spam?
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      It was a couple years ago now, SPF and DMARC (but not DKIM iirc) were sorted. At the time MS used a third party who you could pay to get "vetted", I got a response that the problem was our server host's had another IP (not the one our emails were sent from) that had once had spam sent from it. So the facts we were responding to customer emails, that our domain had ~12 years of good behaviour, and our email servers IP being clean weren't enough. Even "whitelisting" the domain from the Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com end didn't work. I'm still smarting, we still sometimes have problems (from a different host now) but just resend via an outlook.com address and it's fine. So, no never had our domain marked as spam on any dbl that I've checked (but only done that sporadically). We also had a blip with Gmail around the same time (but not the exact same time), but I reported it as a false positive and it was fixed in a few days; no problems since. We were/are sending so few emails (<1 day average) that it's not worth me spending a couple of days trying to see through the murk of MS to fix it. We're probably not losing any revenue, just have to treat MS sent emails differently to everyone else's. Sounds wrong to me too ;o)
      - 72deluxe 7y ago
        That's a pity. I wonder how you ever get off some organisation's bad lists!
zambal 7y ago
If you have a server available, have some time and don't mind fiddling with some config files, you could install a Matrix homeserver. Matrix is a relatively new open source message protocol that offers various bridges to connect to other chat/messenger services: https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
vthriller 7y ago
> what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use There is (was?) plenty of said messengers; Trillian, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium to name a few, plus XMPP transports that could be used from any Jabber client. I've no idea though whether they're still around and play nice with modern walled gardens that require registration by phone no.
neuronic 7y ago
For desktop, but it might be useful nonetheless: https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/
- Kaze404 7y ago
  I used Franz a while back but dropped it because if performance issues. Since it uses the web version of the apps it supports, the performance was just abysmal (most notably on Discord). It's a neat idea that doesn't work very well in practice unfortunately.

ReptileMan 7y ago

Soo just like any other messenger app ever? All the drawbacks are shared. It is not only whatsapp. The idea that with a social graph and metadata you can abuse stuff is hardly novel.

bilekas 7y ago
Not exactly, and its a bit ignorant to claim that.. Storing that amount of information for extended period of time, cataloging it under your identifiable information was not done by all messenger apps. If I leave a WhatsApp group immediately after I don't like what was posted, the data will still reference me. That's not great. It doesn't need to be permenant. Thats kinda the point.
ryanlol 7y ago
> Soo just like any other messenger app ever? No, not at all.

izacus 7y ago

No, WhatsApp is not a dumpster fire. It might be a dumpster fire in ONE aspect the some of people care about, but: It is also one of the most responsive messengers out there. It's also one of the rare messengers what are reliable also on 2G and other very slow and spotty networks. It's also one of the rare messengers that includes video calls, voice calls and mutiple other features that make communication easy. It supports groups, invitations via links and multiple other features that make coordination of communities easy and seamless. And it also doesn't lose all your messaging history everytime your phone breaks. Privacy crowd needs to start understanding this and needs to stop behaving like robots who don't understand WHY people use these apps although they might be "dumpster fire" in that one privacy aspect. And then move to fix Signal and other to make sure they're not "dumpster fire" in aspects the wide users actually care about.

einpoklum 7y ago
Almost all of the features you mentioned are orthogonal to privacy; and in fact, other messaging clients have them, generally. As for keeping your messages - that is a trade-off between convenience and privacy. When people are aware of how their emails are being read, processed and used for spying they often (usually?) choose the privacy option.
- ailideex 7y ago
  I know many people that are well aware that google has access to their emails, all of them still use gmail. not sure who these people who usually choose privacy but I have yet to meet them.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    I'm not sure they are "well aware". Many of us have been told that, once or twice, so we're aware on some level, but we don't have the image in our mind the image of some person in the government being able to essentially sit at our mailbox and read our impolite, hateful or lewd messages.
JakeDavis 7y ago

davidweatherall 7y ago

I don't see an issue here at all. I don't think anyone expects whatsapp to be a super privacy focused app? There are plenty of alternative messenger apps that are privacy focused if that's your requirements. I strongly believe if you asked the majority of users with an engineering background if they thought whatsapp kept a log of "all your contacts and group names, past and present, covering multiple phones you've connected to the account, plus your account info" - they would say yes. These seem like pretty normal things for a messenger app that's focused on UX rather than security to store?

JakeDavis 7y ago
Most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app. Not everyone reads Hacker News and knows the basics of this sector. They are mostly bamboozled by the E2E encryption argument and fail to see the rest.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > You're wrong - most people do think WhatsApp is a privacy focused app. How do you know this to be true? > I feel like you just read the first tweet in a seven part thread and came to a weird conclusion based on an argument that was never made that way. Why are you being so snarky to anyone who disagrees with you in this thread?
  - JakeDavis 7y ago
    I give regular public talks on this matter and ask entire audiences these questions. Most people do think WhatsApp is sort of vaguely more secure than say SMS or Skype and are surprised to learn that it's more complex than E2E encryption. Most people also aren't aware of Edward Snowden beyond just a name in a newspaper. I'm not being snarky, just direct (kind of typing these fast to talk to as many folks who are interested as possible) , sorry if it came across badly to you, that wasn't the intention
    - jamespo 7y ago

dirtydroog 7y ago

The amusing thing is that he complained about this on Twitter. Twitter... the 4chan of messaging.

JakeDavis 7y ago
Hi I'm the OP of this thread. It's not a complaint at all, it's just awareness raising. This stuff is really obvious. Twitter is a tool used by the masses so why not use it to educate and inform.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Doesn't Twitter do the same thing? When you sign up for an account these days if you don't hand over your phone number in sign up it claims your account is a spam account within an hour even if you haven't posted yet. Always presumed it was a basic way to collate alt-accounts to real people in the back end.

skrebbel 7y ago

I think titles like this are actively harmful. WhatsApp is the only mainstream messaging platform that uses proper end-to-end encryption by default. From what I've understood, it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. Sure, it's still not perfect. But to casual readers, it's totally not obvious that if WhatsApp is a "dumpster fire", all popular alternatives except Signal and Matrix and the likes are a nuclear disaster. Nobody at WhatsApp claims that it's good for overthrowing your government. But if I want to send a password to my sister without having her install an app, just to satisfy her brother's tin foil hat, I think WhatsApp is a much better choice than every other option I have readily available. We should stop driving people from somewhat secure tools towards insecure tools.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
> From what I've understood, it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. you forgot WeChat, which is also pretty secure provided that you trust the CCP. > We should stop driving people from somewhat secure tools towards insecure tools. you think that Signal is an insecure tool when compared to WhatsApp?
- pmlnr 7y ago
  > you think that Signal is an insecure tool when compared to WhatsApp? Signal is pretty secure, but Moxie's "The Ecosystem Is Moving" is the wrong mindset. Email is only still alive because anyone* can run their own with their own settings. * including companies and individuals
- skrebbel 7y ago
  No, but a non security geek will not, when reading a headline calling WhatsApp a dumpster fire, think of moving to Signal. They'll likely move to eg Telegram.
est31 7y ago
> it's much safer than other popular alternatives, such as texting, Facebook Messenger, Slack, iMessage, and, yes, Telegram. At least hear out what the Telegram devs have to say about this: > WhatsApp aggressively pushes users to enable backups to third-party services by Apple and Google. Even if you don't backup your messages, it is extremely likely that your chat partners are doing so. It is likely that they don‘t even remember dismissing an annoying notification with a “yes” a long time ago. The interface provides no way of knowing whether or not your messages are being backed up. Meanwhile, for group chats of five members, there’s a 99% probability that all messages are stored on Apple‘s or Google’s servers in the US. > As Product Manager Randall Sarafa put it, just one month after Google Drive backups were introduced to Whatsapp: > “About 75% of Whatsapp users are on Android, and of our Android users, we have about 40% of them opted into Google Drive backups today. That will likely continue to increase over time, as people get prompted.” https://telegra.ph/whatsapp-backdoor-01-16 https://telegra.ph/whatsapp-backdoor-01-16 So Whatsapp's usage of end to end encryption might not be as helpful as advertised. I suggest you use Signal or Threema instead of apps like Whatsapp or Telegram. Both lack options to back up to the cloud.

ailideex 7y ago

WhatsApp is certainly not the least tolerable of all the dumpster fires that are the IM apps that exist today. I really like the ideas behind matrix.org but that is a dumpster fire of epic proportion.

fyrefoxboy12 7y ago

pretty misleading title. not exactly clickbiat, since it provides some "dumpster fire" aspects, but leaving the title like this alone makes it seem that, in its totality, it is a dumpster fire.

tdons 7y ago

I'd like to stop using WhatsApp but it's complicated. The foothold it has over here in Europe (The Netherlands) is enormous. Everybody uses it, there's even neighbourhood watches that use it, see: https://cdn.nieuws.nl/media/sites/305/2015/12/05153708/attentie-whatsapp-buurtpreventie.jpg https://cdn.nieuws.nl/media/sites/305/2015/12/05153708/atten... Any advice? Just pull the plug and pay the social cost?

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
use Signal or Wire and get those you care about to use it too. assumes that you're able to live with the fact that those who don't migrate with you will be unable to messange you. I went through this by uninstalling WhatsApp (when I deleted FB) and informed everyone about it. Many agreed to install Signal and have grown to like it. Many of them I had to help during the process and keep them using it by updating them about security bugs and posts about the benefits and the growing popularity of Signal (such as this one https://www.politico.eu/pro/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to-signal-messaging-app/ https://www.politico.eu/pro/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to...). Some didn't migrate, but they are still able to reach me via email. I'm OK with that outcome of having lost some of those who didn't care.
72deluxe 7y ago
Yep! I'm not on it and never have been (I've been through all the IM systems over the years - MSN, ICQ, IRC, Skype, Hangouts, GChat, GTalk, AIM Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, iMessage literally used every single one, forced to use the memory hog Slack at work) and thought I didn't want to jump on the next bandwagon since SMS fills 99.9% of my needs, and if not, just email me. Turns out that people don't bother communicating with you if you're on SMS, and can never be bothered to write an email. This implies that the communication they were going to send is not important. If it were, they'd write an email. And people don't like the cost of MMS and soon stop sending me stupid pictures. I can archive email + SMS, not any of the other chat systems. I hardly get bothered by any notifications or interruptions or silly photos unlike my wife's phone that is constantly binging and buzzing and silly comments from "family chats" and work chats eg. "lol rofl haha random internet picture" It's refreshingly quiet. If others can't be bothered to find a method to communicate with you, they can't be very sociable? Their friendship and social interaction with you seems to be tied to an app. That's not a social cost - that's a social price.

bArray 7y ago

Is the back-end of WhatsApp like the back-end of the Facebook and Messenger apps? I.e. loads of teams, lots of redundant code, massive attack surface, constantly breaking, etc?

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
their broken input sanitation suggests exactly that. e2ee is just a marketing gimmick if the system as a whole can easily be pawned in other ways. NSO, FinFisher and all the other players peddling exploits to low-ranking LE are having a field day with WhatsApp for reasons that have nothing to do with e2ee. WhatsApp is as much snake-oil as Telegram, and OP was right in calling it a dumpster fire.

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

Keep seeing people who are privacy focused complaining about apps that rely on phone numbers for sign up and identification. Honestly would think if you're concerned about that then handing over your phone number should be the last thing you're doing.

graynk 7y ago

Now, I hate WhatsApp as much as the next guy, but no matter how much I re-read this thread I can't see the issue for the life of me. Isn't it obvious it's doing all those things? Of course it stores all your groups, of course it syncs all your contacts: it explicitly asks for permission to do so.

ajconway 7y ago

To sum up, WhatsApp stores metadata that's required to run the service, and previous contacts and groups on top of that. The additional information is probably retained in order to fight spam (not an easy task in an end-to-end encrypted setting with more than one billion of users). Facebook may be evil, but not because of WhatsApp.