And if so, why exactly? It says it’s end-to-end encrypted. The metadata isn’t. But what is metadata and is it bad that it’s not? Are there any other problematic things?
I think I have a few answers for these questions, but I was wondering if anyone else has good answers/explanations/links to share where I can inform myself more.
It says it’s end-to-end encrypted.
Whatsapp is closed source and made by a advertising company. Wouldnt really count on that
Edit: Formatting
“We just capture what you wrote and to whom before it gets encrypted and sent; we see nothing wrong with that” —Mark Zuckerberg, probably
They don’t really need the actual contents of your messages if they have the associated metadata, since it is not encrypted, and provides them with plenty of information.
So idk, I honestly don’t see why I shouldn’t believe them. Don’t get me wrong though, I fully support the scepticism.
This is what I came to express as well. Unless the software is open source, both client and server, what they say is unverifiable and it’s safest to assume it’s false. Moreover, the owning company has a verifiable and well known history of explicitly acting against user privacy. There is no reason to trust them and every reason not to.
- shiveyarbles ( @shiveyarbles@beehaw.org ) 25•8 months ago
It’s owned by Meta, you better forget about privacy lol!
The biggest problem is that it uploads your entire contact list and thus social network to Facebook. That alone tells them a lot about who you are, and crucially, also leaks this information about your friends (whether they use it or not).
With contacts disabled it’s a pain to use (last time I tried you couldn’t add people or see names, but you could still write to people after they contacted you if you didn’t mind them just showing up as a phone number).
It still collects metadata - who you text, when, from which WiFi - which reveals a lot. But if both you and your contact use it properly (backups disabled or e2e encrypted), your messaging content doesn’t get leaked by default. They could ship a malicious version and if someone reports your content it gets leaked, of course, but overall, still much better than e.g. telegram which collects all of the above data AND doesn’t have useful E2EE (you can enable it but few do, and the crypto is questionable).
Metadata is all the content of a message besides the actual text content of the message (i.e. what you type). Examples would be the date and time it is sent, what users these messages were sent to / from, and the IP addresses of both parties. (The availability of metadata varies from messenger to messenger).
I like this example: If you only text your Aunt Sally, who lives in Alaska, twice per year to wish her a happy birthday and Christmas, just by looking at the metadata someone could infer the meaning of your messages, as well as your relationship to the person you’re messaging. To a point this is true about any messages you sent.
As for Whatsapp specifically, it being end-to-end doesn’t really matter imo, as the application is not open source and is owned by an advertising / social media company. As long as the code is closed source, you cannot be sure:
- That your messages are encrypted at all
- That your encryption keys are kept on-device, and not plainly available to a centralized party
- That the encryption the application is using is securely implemented
At least for applications handling truly sensitive information (for the average person only their messenger and browser), you should be using open source software. The easiest recommendations I can make are:
- Browsers: Firefox, Thorium, Brave (disabled all cryptocrap)
- Messengers: Signal, SimpleX Chat, XMPP
Anyways, I hope this was a satisfactory answer.
I’m iffy on Brave as a recc but otherwise this comment is fantastic. Hope OP reads it over
Added an obligatory disable cryptocrap to make it slightly more bearable
That your messages are encrypted at all
That your encryption keys are kept on-device, and not plainly available to a centralized party
That the encryption the application is using is securely implementedThis is true, but something that should be noted is that, to my knowledge, no law enforcement agency has ever received the supposedly encrypted content of WhatsApp messages. Facebook Messenger messages are not E2E encrypted by default, and there have been several stories about Facebook being served a warrant for message content and providing it. This has, as I understand, not occurred for WhatsApp messages. It is possible, of course, that they do have some kind of access and only provide it to very high-level intelligence agencies, but there’s no direct evidence of that.
I would personally say that it’s more likely than not that WhatsApp message content is legitimately private, but I’d also agree that you should use something like Signal if you’re genuinely concerned about this.
If you log into WhatsApp on another device, does your history show up?
If it does, that means they hold your encryption keys on their server. It’s the only way this could work.
It’s why with Signal you need to maintain your keys and keep backups. No one else has your keys, so logging in to other devices won’t get history without that backup and the keys.
Works this way with encrypted XMPP too, of course.
You have to scan a QR code from the website with your phone, which I’m assuming then facilitates a transfer of the keys.
That’s essentially what’s been posited by this rando on StackExchange.
Does it work if your other devices are offline? That would be telling.
How do I know other browsers/messengers actually include the code that is published when they arrive on my phone? Wouldn’t it be possible to simply add tracking/malicious code outside of the open-source repository, build an APK from it and put that on the Play Store instead of the “clean” code on the repository?
You could compile the software yourself, and the builds they do publish are reproducable, therefore any hidden malicious code would almost certainly be noticed in any popular application.
What use is this knowledge through metadata to them? Let’s say I have no Facebook account and no other apps by Meta. There are no ads within WhatsApp. What do they gain by having this data about me?
They know your relationships with other people, and could infer things about you which will be stored in their servers regardless of whether you have a Facebook account, I believe if you search for “shadow accounts” you can read more about that
they can sell the information tied to your phone number or IP address to other companies, so they in turn now what ads to bombard you with.
Is Facebook bad for privacy?
Whatsapp is Facebook. Literally. Whatsapp sold themselves to Facebook.
So yes: it’s bad for privacy.
Are you really asking about privacy of a Facebook’s app?
Are you going to be flippant or help educate the person?
The answer is: Yes, WhatsApp is bad for privacy.
It says it’s end-to-end encrypted. The metadata isn’t. But what is metadata and is it bad that it’s not?
It’s not just that. Their app can easily have tracking components that look for the list of installed apps, how often you charge your phone, how often are you on a WiFi network, etc.
Also, the app and any tracking component it has can also freely communicate on the wifi network. That doesn’t only mean the internet, but the local, home network too, where they can find out (by MAC address, opened ports and response of the corresponding programs) what kind of devices you have, when do you have them powered on, what software you use on it (like do you use any bittorrent client? syncthing? kde connect? lots of other examples?), and if let’s say your smart tv publishes your private info on the network, it does not matter that you have blocked LG (just an example) domains in your local dns server, because facebook’s apps can just relay it through your phone and then their own servers.
If the app’s code has been obfuscated, exodus privacy and others won’t be able to detect the tracking components in it.
Are others different, like Signal and how do I know?
As a normal user I install both in exactly the same way, I have no way to verify that the code of the apk on the play store is exactly the same as the code published by Signal as open-source. How could I trust Signal more?
You can only know if you choose to read the code and compile from source. You can trust, in that your read the code and just install the app, or let others read the code for you. If reputable sources tell you it’s good, most of the time it’s good. How can you trust Signal more? Well you… shouldn’t. You could try to use a decompilation tool, don’t know if that works on Android’s apps though.
Are others different, like Signal
Signal’s encryption is sound, but there’s an uncomfortable fact that it uses google play services dependencies (like for maps and other things, I think). There are articles (1, 2) that discuss that it has functionality that may allow an other process (the google play services process) to read the signal app’s state or even directly it’s memory because of that, which can mean the contents of the screen or the in-memory cache of decrypted messages.
Security audits often only audit the app’s own source code, without the dependencies that it uses.
The google play services dependency could have a “flaw” today, or it could grow a new “feature” one day, allowing what I described above.May or may not be connected, that Moxie (signal founder) is vehemently against any kinds of forks, including those that just get rid of non-free dependencies (like the google play services dependencies). The other comments of his are also telling.
Because of these, I have ruled for myself that I’ll not promote them as a better system, and I’ll not install Signal on my phone, because I think it gives a false sense of security, and for other things like still requiring an identity connected identifier (a phone number) for registration.
However if there were people whom I can only reach through Signal, there’s Molly. They maintain 2 active forks, one of which is rid of problematic dependencies, and I would probably use that. Molly-FOSS is not published on the official F-droid repository, but they have their own, so the F-droid app can still be used to install it and keep it updated.and how do I know?
It’s hard, unfortunately, and in the end you need to trust a service and the app you use for it.
F-droid apps are auditable, they are forbidden from having non-free (non-auditable) dependencies, and popular apps available in the official repository are usually fine.
With google play, again the truth is uncomfortable.
On Android, the app’s signing key (a cryptographic key) makes it possible to verify that the app that you are going to install has not been modified by third parties.
Several years ago Google has mandated that all app developers are required to hand in their signing keys, so that google can sign the apps instead of them, basically impersonating them. Unfortunately this also means that unless the app’s total source code is available (along with all the source code of it’s dependencies), it’s impossible to know if google has done modifications to the app that they make accessible on the google play store. This in itself is already a huge trust issue to me, but what is even worse is that they can just install custom modified versions for certain users on a case by case basis, with the same signing key that once meant that it was not modified by third parties like google, and no one will know it ever.Just an example to show that the above is possible: the amazon web store similarly also requires the developer to hand over the app’s signing key, and they admit in the documentation that they add their own tracking code to every published app.
Thank you a lot, this is great information!
While the messages itself are encrypted, the WhatsApp App itself can still collect data from you from the Device your using it on:
- Phone number
- operating system
- associated contacts Etc.
And given this is a Meta owned company, we can probably assume they profile you from that.
If you’re on Android, the E2E is meaningless as WhatsApp can read what you type, just as the Facebook app can, since they have keyboard access.
I don’t know that they do this, just saying it’s a leak point, and since it’s Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg, well, let’s just say I’m a bit cynical.
Your address book is uploaded to Facebook servers when you use Whatsapp. And each time you interact, they know with who and link this information with other profiles and users of the Meta products.
This image somehow is such low quality on my device that I can’t read any of the text on it.
WhatsApp Moderators Can Read Your Messages - https://gizmodo.com/whatsapp-moderators-can-read-your-messages-1847629241
…if someone reports them
That means if they want to see your messages they do it anytime, not only when someone report it.
If a government want access to the messages they can access.
but how can they read them when its encrypted?
Unlike other messaging apps, they have access to encryption keys, when you change devices you only need to fill the phone number and all of your messages are available.
On other apps like Signal or matrix, you need to backup or export your keys to other devices, otherwise you can access previous messages.
It’s like you own an apartment and the doorman have keys to all apartments, if you lose the key the doorman can give you a copy, but also have access to your apartment when it pleases.
Don’t you need to have backed up your messages in Google drive to be able to restore them when changing devices? And up until the multi device update when someone changed their phone you’d get a text saying your encryption keys with them has changed.
And I remember talks in matrix about the need for a single password solution to appeal to masses.
Yes.
In the iOS Appstore you can see which data they want to obtain.