As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.”
“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
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I’ve always considered iTunes to be one of the worst pieces of software ever written, but WhatsApp is a very close second.
Only a tech illiterate can expect privacy from a closed source program, open source is a requirement for both privacy and security.
You gatta be real stupid to not realize that Facebook is harvesting your data.
No surprised at all tbf.
I never used WhatsApp, but what made people think they used e2e? I’m way passed blindly believing what any company says they do without proof. I’d expect some kind of key or certificate management in the app, is that present?
Heck… my default is still to think every website does plaintext password storage. I can’t prove it, but neither can they. Stop storing my passwords in plaintext lemmy! /s
People expect it what WhatsApp claims it’s E2E encrypted at the start of each chat:
Back at the start WhatsApp wasn’t free, although it was pretty cheap. Then Meta bought it and made it free. Some time after that, the founders left and started Signal.
The E2E encrypted protocol WhatsApp used to use was the Signal protocol. When the OG founders left and created Signal they revamped it, calling it the Signal V2 protocol. Whether WhatsApp still uses that original Signal protocol or not is probably not known to many people outside of Meta, but WhatsApp definitely used to be E2E encrypted prior to Meta’s purchase.
I deleted my WhatsApp account around the time Meta announced they were merging all of their messaging stuff together, e.g. Facebook Messenger, Instagram etc.
Around a year ago WhatsApp had large ads that just said “no one else can read your messages.” I don’t think most people thought that some one could, which makes me wonder why they were paying so much to say it.
Any time they get asked questions like “Are my messages visible only to me?”, they answer with a very canned response like “Your messages are encrypted from end-to-end and can’t be read by anyone while in transit” … or words to that effect. I have never seen them state that no analytics or telemetry is happening on the unencrypted side by the client. Which has always bothered me.
Proposed line of defense: “With all respect, M. Judge, with all the different times we fucked our users, lied to them, tricked them, experimented on them, ignored them, we already sold private discussions on Facebook in the past, our CEO and founder most famous quote is «They trust me, dumbfucks!», the list goes on and on: no one in their sane mind would genuinely believe we were not spying on Whatsapp! They try to play dumb, they could not possibly believe we were being fair and honest THIS time?!”
15 years ago I’d have called this a conspiracy theory given how the evidence seems to be anecdotal, but given literally every single other thing we’ve learned in recent times about how cartoonishly evil and lying the tech bros truly are, it seems entirely likely.
Wait, you are telling me that the company whos entire business is collecting personal information, including people who don’t sign up for their services, to leverage for advertising, is keeping their platforms unsecured they can continually grab more information rather than secure it?
I for one am shocked, absolutely shocked.
Yes, except they’re not leveraging your data for advertising, they’re leveraging it so they can manipulate your political views and keep you from finding solidarity with other working people.
@FlyingCircus @technology These two things are the same thing
Well if I can’t trust Meta with my information, who CAN I trust
The drunk dude that’s always sitting on the ground near the park entrance and sell weird tissue dolls with curly hairs is more trustworthy, I’d say.
Me
Oh okay. My location is 55.752121, 37.617664, my full name is Jeremy, and my password is hunter9. I trust you not to tell this to anybody
Nice to see the ancient lore alive.
Your full name is “Jeremy”?
Oh god damnit chemicalprofet why did you tell this guy i thougjt i could trust you :((
All I see is ‘••••••’
I see ‘******’ though.
Maybe it’s just a different interface.
Jeremy “Iks” Hunter IX
Edit: IX. Iks. I think we got it right now.
The Ninth
Pronounced “iks”
Just like Cher (which is short for Cheremy).
Your secret is safe with us and our 36,893 affiliates.
Can confirm, chemicalprophet is the best password manager I’ve ever used.
Ah! You did your own research!
ta
Shocking.
E2EE isn’t really relevant, when the “ends” have the functionality, to share data with Meta directly: as “reports”, “customer support”, “assistance” (Meta AI); where a UI element is the separation.
Yeah. E2EE isn’t a single open standard. It’s a general security concept / practice. There’s no way to argue that they don’t really have E2EE if in fact they do, but they keep a copy of the encryption key for themselves. Also, the workers client app can simply have the “decrypt step” done transparently. Or, a decrypted copy of the messages could be stored in a cache that the client app uses… who knows? E2EE being present or not isn’t really the main story here. It’s Meta’s obvious deceitful-ness by leveraging the implicit beliefs about E2EE held by us common folk.
Yeah, I guess if you want users to keep sharing “confessions, [] difficult debates, or silly inside jokes” through a platform you’ve acquired, E2EE might give the WhatsApp user the false sense of privacy required.
I don’t think it can be called End to End Encryption if it is actually End to End and The guy in the Middle.
Every technical definition of End to End Encryption states only the Sender and Recipient have keys to decrypt the message.
Anything else is using “End to End Encryption” purely as a marketing term like “Lite” or “Pure”.
It’s not End to End and The guy in the Middle. The message is encrypted from one end to the other. The detail about who has a copy of the key doesn’t spoil that fact, and I guarantee you Meta doesn’t care about using E2EE as a marketing term even if it misrepresents their actual product by matter of status quo. What matters is what they can theoretically argue in a court room.
A proper solution would be to have an open standard that specially calls out these details, along with certifications issued by trusted third parties.
It is end to end encrypted but they can just pull the decrypted message from the app. This has been assumed for years, since they said they could parse messages for advertising purposes.
Hasn’t it always been that they can decrypt the backups that you personally setup in wa, this way they don’t legally lie to you when the app tells you “this chat is encrypted, even Whatsapp cannot read the messages”.
Yes, any time you can store and recover encrypted cloud archives across devices, without needing to transfer keys between devices, it implies that there is a key archive somewhere in the cloud. Even Signal struggles to get this both user friendly and properly secure without compromising forward secrecy. I believe they still actually make you explicitly do a local key transfer to populate a new device, even though they have cloud archives now. Whatsapp doesn’t do that. And the app also clearly leaks some amount of unencrypted data anyway, archives or not.
it’s not even that: they just hold the keys so can simply decrypt your messages with out your clients intervention any time they like
Yep, If they can access messages that are deleted from your device, then they have the keys.
If I am not adding my own private key to the app, like in Tox, I don’t trust their encryption.
What’s to stop an evil company uploading the keys as soon as you enter them in the App? It certainly wouldn’t stop Meta.
Tox also isn’t that great security wise. It’s hard to beat Signal when it comes to security messengers. And Signal is open source so, if it did anything weird with private keys, everyone would know
And Signal is open source so, if it did anything weird with private keys, everyone would know
Well, no. At least not by default as you are running a compiled version of it. Someone could inject code you don’t know anything about before compilation that for example leaked your keys.
One way to be more confident no one has, would be to have predictable builds that you can recreate and then compare the file fingerprints. But I do not think that is possible, at least on android, as google holds they signature keys to apps.
Signal is also on F-Droid, so it should be verifiable
Signal has reproducible builds and here’s the instruction how to check it on Android https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Well, Whatsapp uses signal. Bad timing
It only uses some of signal’s code. Not necessarily the OOTB key storage and security.
How?
Read more than just the title ffs
I did and nowhere is Signal mentioned in the article.
You state Whatsapp uses Signal. So, again: how?
The article does not describe what encryption it uses, it described how they’re abusing it. Whatsapp using Signal protocol is public knowledge.
What I’m trying to say is that a company using signal for it’s messaging app does not imply your data is safe from that company or governments.
You recommending an app purely because of Signal protocol under an article about how an app abuses signal protocol is pretty fucking ironic (aka. bad timing)
Unless proof is given, assume troll
Read the article? An app using signal does not imply that your data is still encrypted from corporations or government. Your neighbour joe is not very likely to break already established SSL, so using signal feels like someone is trying to sell me a bridge. Sense of false security. In fact, that was probably their goal all along.
WhatsApp is using Signals protocol for communication: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I don’t fully understand what it entails, but from what I understand is that yes, WhatsApp is using the same encryption and message flow that signal uses, but you’re still using Meta’s app, and they can just read the plaintext message from there.
To my knowledge, under Signal, the encription keys are locally generated and stored, and the traffic flows between end points as a closed packet.
This does not seem to be the case here, as the keys are generated and stored outside your equipment and, thus, are viable to be used by a third party to access packets.
But I admit I speak heavily burdened by technical ignorance.
My understanding is they’re sending a request to your device that then decrypts and uploads messages, not storing the keys outside your device.
that’s incorrect. with whatsapp, your keys are stored on meta servers (the same as things like imessage). they can simply decrypt them whenever they like, just like being signed in as you. it’s completely invisible to your client
Or they can make a copy of the encryption keys on creation. Using the code is very different than using the code unedited, or using all the code.
What’s stopping the app from keeping your private key and still not encrypting anything?
I’m not trying to be difficult here, I just don’t see how anything outside of an application whose source you can check yourself can be trusted.
All applications hosted by other people require you to react positively to “just trust me bro”.
Or, if the app has the private key for decryption for the user to be able to see the messages, what’s stopping the app from copying that decrypted text somewhere else?
The thread model isn’t usually key management, it’s more about the insecure treatment of the decrypted message after decryption.
Man, you just brought back memories. I forgot qtox was even a thing. I think I still have my profile saved in my dev folder somewhere for my account
It was obvious.
