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I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch: He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of criti

I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch: He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything. (and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case) My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"

sdfjkhdfjkdhs 6mo ago
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.
dariosalvi78 6mo ago
maybe China is right: one app to rule them all
GenerWork 6mo ago
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
jandrewrogers 6mo ago
Some European governments are effectively run via WhatsApp.
FabHK 6mo ago
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl??? Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  Whatsapp "claims" to be e2e, but nobody knows for sure since its sources are closed.
  - prmoustache 6mo ago
    Still more secure than non encrypted email yet a lot of people still use email to send fairly sensitive data.
    - account42 6mo ago
      Email doesn't go through an app controlled by Facebook so I don't agree about your security assessment.
      - FabHK 6mo ago
        You don't know where your email goes through, and email for sure is not end to end encrypted. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol. Closed source code can be decompiled, open source does not magically give you better security properties.
        LtWorf 6mo ago
        > WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol claims to do so. > open source does not magically give you better security properties. Reproducible builds do, in fact I have no idea if you and I are running the same whatsapp at all.

sdfjkhdfjkdhs 6mo ago

I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.

dariosalvi78 6mo ago

maybe China is right: one app to rule them all

GenerWork 6mo ago

This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.

jandrewrogers 6mo ago

Some European governments are effectively run via WhatsApp.

FabHK 6mo ago

To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl??? Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)

LtWorf 6mo ago
Whatsapp "claims" to be e2e, but nobody knows for sure since its sources are closed.
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  Still more secure than non encrypted email yet a lot of people still use email to send fairly sensitive data.
  - account42 6mo ago
    Email doesn't go through an app controlled by Facebook so I don't agree about your security assessment.
    - FabHK 6mo ago
      You don't know where your email goes through, and email for sure is not end to end encrypted. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol. Closed source code can be decompiled, open source does not magically give you better security properties.
      - LtWorf 6mo ago
        > WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol claims to do so. > open source does not magically give you better security properties. Reproducible builds do, in fact I have no idea if you and I are running the same whatsapp at all.