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While I share your general suspicion I don't think they need to see the messages to get a lot of privacy-violating use out of WhatsApp. When the NSA was talkin
by eldridgea 6y ago
While I share your general suspicion I don't think they need to see the messages to get a lot of privacy-violating use out of WhatsApp.
When the NSA was talking about metadata collection, they said it was more useful than actual data. Likely because it's already computer consumable, and less dense.
If FB gets your contact lists, and sees who you message, how much, and when, that's probably a hugely valuable commodity to them.
- _eqet 6y agoMaybe true, however computing power has increased substantially since then. It's quite easy for them to index all the messages and search for them later, or setup alerts on key words.
- beagle3 6y agoMetadata is more useful than data in the sense that data may be “encrypted” using a different unknown scheme between every two users (e.g. a hitman may discuss “a job”, a bribe might be described as “a gift”, a non public stock tip might be “weather is going to be good tomorrow”). However, metadata is always what it is. If you have someone who is distance 2 from 20 people who died unnaturally, but not distance 1 - that person is likely related to their untimely death. The reason metadata is useful is because, unlike the text, it is generally required to be unobfuscated to 3rd parties for the communication to be useful to the 1st and 2nd parties.
- rapnie 6y agoThey might also get info on links you share, as the app makes a request to get the OpenGraph metadata. Who knows.
- im3w1l 6y ago> the app makes a request to get the OpenGraph metadata Just to be clear here, is this your speculation or a known thing?