• I never expected that they’d put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
    It’s one of those things that everyone will be crazy about for a week and then… poof, it will just become irrelevant, because it doesn’t really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
    Maybe it’s Zucc’s way to get us acquainted with treating bots like humans, so one day he can finally come out as a robot and be accepted by the wider society

        • Polar ( Polar@lemmy.ca ) 
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          3 years ago

          I don’t forget what it’s like to be 15, because I had a great childhood, but I also grew up and started doing crazy things like moving out, renting a home, etc, and if your landlord requires you to download WhatsApp, or any other app to communicate, you do it. Otherwise you’ll find yourself on the street, messaging yourself on Signal lmao.

          • Blizzard ( Blizzard@lemmy.zip ) 
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            3 years ago

            if your landlord requires you to download WhatsApp, or any other app to communicate, you do it.

            Your landlord tells you what apps to download on your phone and you do it? What parallel reality do you live in?

              • Blizzard ( Blizzard@lemmy.zip ) 
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                3 years ago

                Your landlord tells you no smoking in the house and you do it?

                When I did smoke cigarettes, I would go outside not to have a smelly appartment. I did keep smoking joins inside with prejudice though, it’s not like they’d visit to check up on me.

                the real estate agent communicates between my landlord and myself via WhatsApp group chat?

                That’s dystopian… The agency has my e-mail to send me bills and occasionally some important residential information, they have my phone number for absolute emergencies, other than that I don’t want to hear from them or… chat with them? I’m still processing why do you need to be in a group chat or how can landlord force you to install an app on your phone. What if you don’t have a smartphone? It’s not like it’s obligatory to have one.

                Renting an apartment is a mutual agreement for which you pay your rent, it’s not like they are doing you a favour or anything, and you behave like you’re their slave or something.

    • Oliver Lowe ( otl@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      3 years ago

      Not that simple, unfortunately :( The problem is that one particular vendor (Meta) controls the client - the app - to the service (Whatsapp). Right now we can only hope that Signal doesn’t add this kind of feature. There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.

      • handvat ( handvat@lemmy.ml ) 
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        3 years ago

        And that’s why European Union introduced the Digital Markets Act. By March 2024, Meta will need to give a way for third party clients to communicate with WhatsApp users in 1-to-1 chats. Group chats will probably follow 2 years after.

  • I’m just gonna say, end to end encryption is jack shit when they can just access the content at the source, analyze it with local rules and call sending to meta how often you talk about a certain topic and with whom telemetry

  • End-to-end encryption is the best possible safeguard against Meta snooping on your data.

    This has always been my biggest pet peeve with WhatsApp. Yes, they might encrypt it all and the encryption might be practically unbreakable, but what worries me is what Meta might do with the private encryption keys. Lem me elaborate further.

    I’ll start by trying to explain how key-based encryption, the type of encryption WhatsApp uses, work at their core, for those who don’t know (THIS IS GOING TO BE AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION). Imagine you want a friend to send you a message with super sensitive contents. Here’s what you do to guarantee that no one else can read it but you:

    • First, you generate two keys, which are pretty much two really big numbers. One will be called the public key and the other one will be the private key.
    • Then, you go to the person who wants to send you stuff and say “Hey John, remember that really important message you wanted to send me? Take my public key and make sure you cypher your message using it”.
    • Once you receive the message, you decypher it using the private key. Using the private key is the only way you can read this message. You can’t use the public key for it because it won’t work.

    This means that, if someone else manages to get the encrypted message, they will need the private key to read what it says, but they don’t have it, only you have it. The only thing they can do keep guessing what that key is until they find what it was and read the message, but that can take up to millions of years, even using supercomputers.

    As you can see, this works really well for sending messages without anyone but the sender and the reciever knowing what is being said, and that’s why it’s so used in encrypted message apps…

    …but what if Meta has access to the private keys? I mean, what if, after WhatsApp creating the public and private keys for messaging, the private key is retrieved and stored in Meta’s servers, making them able to read all the messages you receive?

    Can someone with more experience in the subject say if my concerns are valid?

    • Rai ( Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      3 years ago

      I have never believed Facebook when they’ve said they don’t have the ability to see your messages. There’s no proof of that whatsoever. And it’s fucking FACEBOOK.

      I would be SHOCKED if they didn’t have access to private keys.

    • I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain… maybe it’s not

      What I’d be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be “Oh, this person texts their mum every morning”, but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be “accused” of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that’s besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.

      In the end none of us have anything to hide… until we suddenly do

      I know this wasn’t argued here, but I’d like to make it clear anyways: You don’t have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don’t want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.

    • I share that concern and would not rely on my messaging being secure. Anyways as far as they state it themself, your private key for decrypting should stay on your device (in fact it uses the signal protocol and does a few more steps, e.g. to implement shared sessions over multiple devices. You can have a look at their FAQ, they’ve linked a white paper within it describing the technical details). But the main question is in my opinion: do you trust the guarantees they give you? It’s the same struggle as with any proprietary software. You can trust them or you don’t, but you will never know without access to the source code.