Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's WhatsApp Data Gambit Faces Federal Privacy Complaint (vice.com)
Sam Gustin, writing for Motherboard: Facebook's decision to begin harvesting data from its popular WhatsApp messaging service provoked a social media uproar on Thursday, and prompted leading privacy advocates to prepare a federal complaint accusing the tech titan of violating US law. On Thursday morning, WhatsApp, which for years has dined out on its reputation for privacy and security, announced that it would begin sharing user phone numbers with its Menlo Park-based parent company in an effort "to improve your Facebook ads and products experiences." Consumer privacy advocates denounced the move as a betrayal of WhatsApp's one billion users -- users who had been assured by the two companies that "nothing would change" about the messaging service's privacy practices after Facebook snapped up the startup for a whopping $19 billion in 2014. "WhatsApp users should be shocked and upset," Claire Gartland, Consumer Protection Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading US consumer advocacy group, told Motherboard. "WhatsApp obtained one billion users by promising that it would protect user privacy. Both Facebook and WhatsApp made very public promises that the companies would maintain a separation. Those were the key selling points of the deal."
And the TOS certainly said that this could change at any time. In the US it's legal to be shady this way. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it's allowed. And I don't think there was much in terms of regulatory review of this deal where any explicit promises were made to government entities. I may be wrong here, but if I go double check I won't get a first post.
that I do not alter it further.
Facebook altered its Terms of Service to the detriment of it's user base in order to make more money. That's not news, it's a day at the office.
They both had their fingers crossed when they made the privacy promises. But seriously, anyone who thought FB wasn't going to harvest data at some point from a company they bought was seriously mistaken.
Let's be honest anyone with half a brain knew such a thing was coming as soon as the purchase was confirmed.
Some people saw this coming when WhatsApp was sold.
How do you think Facebook where going to recoup the money? By turning their users into a product they can sell of course.
Surprised?
You shouldn't be, this how it works with social platforms; you aren't a user - you are a product.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
just switch to linux!
Be or ben't
The app appers at WhatsApp are simply apping apps while apping other apps! Everything's super appy, unlike LUDDITE software like LUDDITE text messages!
Apps!
We have to always remember Facebook is a Business and businesses exist at the end of the day to make money.
So why should they be shocked? You did not expect this?
Perhaps Facebook can tell us what Better User Experience they can create by mining the phone number of private, encrypted text messages?
I've found that by replacing WhatsApp with Signal I have a far better user experience, namely my private communications remain private. I've already removed Facebook from my phone, I can use my laptop for the occasional checking up on what family and friends are doing
$subject
Hope a paid alternative to WhatsApp emerges.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If your policy violated the US privacy policies as a company that is that big, you know you fucked up.
Or perhaps it is just greedy politicians that want extra money to change the law.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Their alleged claim of wanting to "improve your Facebook ads and products experiences" is pure bullshit... while this might be obvious to anyone who knows about Facebook's track record, the claim does not even withstand remotely objective scrutiny.
Assume just for a moment that their claim of wanting to improve the user experience were true....Consider that Whatsapp has no information about the content of any messages sent between users, so any content within the messages that are sent cannot be harvested to generate any kind of targeted advertising, the *only* thing that they have are names and phone numbers, and who is sending messages to whom, with no basis for understanding why beyond anything that might have been communicated out of band directly to Whatsapp. So since Whatsapp has no information about its users that can be used to actually generate any kind of "improved advertising experience" for its users, the assumption that this is what they actually are trying to do cannot possibly be correct.
There is nothing remotely tenable I can see about the notion that this could even somehow theoretically create an improved experience for the end user, and Facebook's claims that it would do so would seem to be wholly transparent lies.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
BULLSHIT. I have to stop you right there. There is 0% chance that this service ever had a reputation for privacy and security. I've never even used it, and have only heard about it occasionally, and even from a position of extreme ignorance, I know for sure that it never could have possibly fooled anyone who was thinking.
Protocols can have reputations for privacy and security. An application which uses proprietary protocols can't ever have that. That day simply isn't ever going to arrive. If you can't study it, then it will never have the capacity to persuade you that it might work. That is such a basic fundamental that I just can't believe we're still talking about it.
When you are evaluating whether or not something works, it is totally reasonable (not even slightly paranoid) to hypothesize the case "What if a service provider goes rogue?" (Proof that it's not paranoid: it happened in this case.) When people say they saw this coming when Facebook bought it, I have to call bullshit on that too, because it was an obvious risk even before Facebook bought it. The service provider could voluntarily become evil on their own, or their servers could be compromised by someone else (e.g. FSB, NSA, common criminals, whatever).
So, maybe you're wondering: how could I know this was vulnerable? Well, that's easy: what information were you giving to this app? How can you possibly not be aware that you told someone else your phone number? It just totally doesn't make any fucking sense that anyone thought their phone number was a secret after they told someone else about it.
Then, when you go digging in to the very basics of what this service is and how it works from a user's point of view (this is not even slightly technical or nerdy; every single Whatsapp user knows what I'm about to tell the rest of you), here is what you see: users create an account on another machine! That is: there is a centralized directory, owned by the company! I'm not fucking reverse-engineering this program; this information is on the fucking wikipedia page!! Every single one of you users, who are now lying out your fucking asshole saying you thought it was secure and private, KNEW you were creating an account on some company's central directory. STOP YOUR FUCKING LYING. You knew it wasn't secure.
Unless.. Ah.. unless...
Ok, there is one way that you might possibly not be a fucking dishonest insincere liar. You might be laboring under the idea that it could possibly be secure, if you are so overwhelmingly stupid that you think its security is a function of the company's good intentions, rather than what they are theoretically capable of doing.
Is that it? I think so. After decades of lessons, people still aren't thinking in terms of capabilities. That's why you cry when companies and governments betray you, instead of you having a policy of denying them capabilities.
Well, have we learning anything yet? Can we get past this rather obvious error, and start thinking about security in a more common sensey way?
I'm not asking you to not trust. I'm not asking you to stop trusting people.
Don't trust apps; trust designs. Don't know the design? Then you can't trust it. I'm not saying they're untrustworthy; I'm saying that if you can't see the design, then a trustworthy person doesn't have a way to explain to you why they're trustworthy. Get it? And they didn't tell you how it was impossible for them to share the directory. Turns out, the reason they couldn't tell you how it was impossible, is that it was not only possible, but trivial.
So please, enough of the "I trusted them" nonsense.
Centralized systems will always be ripe for abuse, it isn't question of IF, but WHEN your data will be harvested and profiled.
The only feasible solution to combat this is distributed peer to peer implementations. Maybe good people at TOR project could take a short break from trying to save the world and build a privacy-conscious chat app for the masses?
Well, if the federal government forced on messaging systems a requirement to interchange with other messaging systems, then some of this may be reduced? Back in the 20th century this was done for the voice-landline networks and in many ways has resulted in the only non-fragmented, multi-vendor, communications system we have today. GSMA was formed because of the fragmentation of the analogue cellular networks at the time, but inherited to a certain extent the regulatory requirements to interconnect.
XMPP held a certain promise there, but because there was no regulatory requirement, businesses just said 'screw this and lets keep our little nation states isolated for more money'. We saw this happen with both Facebook and Google. Other systems just made it difficult for apps such as Pidgin to talk to their systems from the start.
Myself I would welcome any move to interconnect, since I have 5 messaging apps just to be able to keep up with friends, since the favoured platform varies with region. SMS isn't the best, but most friends still have a phone number.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
+1 Mod this up please.
Should read the fable, "Scorpion and the Frog".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But why do I feel like nothing is going to be done about this?
Facebook and/or whats app MIGHT acknowledge the back lash if it's big enough... and by "acknowledge" I mean reassure everyone that "nothing is actually changing" (even though something obviously is) and that "no one's privacy is in jeopardy" even if
Nothing to see here, move along citizen.
Public assurances, do not a legal action make.
A few months ago, I wanted to try whatsapp on Android. The app asked me for permission to dig into my contacts, which I refused.
You can't do much without that permission: impossible to start a conversation, impossible to input a name for someone that started a conversation with you, impossible to add contacts by hand in whatsapp; it have to be in the phone contact's list.
When I asked their support about this, they kindly redirected me to their FAQs, explained to me that they use phone numbers to identify contact, that it was for my convenience that this was required, etc. I even got a full rundown of Android permissions required by whatsapp. No option to ever start a conversation by typing a phone number ever came on the table.
Best part was this: "We value your privacy and we do not sell your personal information to anyone.". I suppose technically it's not sold "to anyone", but still. Trust is the most important thing you need in this business; if you require from people to give you all their infos, then pull jokes like that, you might as well just stop doing business.
https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/e...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I feel like this should be the first post to any news article along these lines.....
XKCD Warned You
On closed platforms your data security is only as good as the word of your provider.
A word that can be bought and sold without your consent.
Stallman was right.
Since I don't use Facebook, my number should be irrelevant to them to serve me advertisement in their platform. Furthermore, I use the anti-social plugins for browsing so they don't get my browsing history either.
If this really bothers you, Signal is a perfectly good alternative to WhatsApp, which is completely open source and with almost identical functionality. Another surprisingly good and also open source alternative is Wire, which doesn't rely on phone numbers, and it's completely multiplatform.
If you can't vote with your dollars, vote with your feet.
that way you will be too busy fighting off rapists to have any friends. win-win!
Then you're either not very smart, or you've been paying ZERO attention for the last decade or two.
Facebook didn't buy Whatsapp because they like their logo - they bought them to monetize them somehow.
The way Facebook USUALLY monetizes things is to learn as much about you as possible, and then sell ads targeting you.
It's hardly surprising that Facebook would start to try to make use of any data that Whatsapp has. And remember that Facebook acts as though it things privacy is a thing for other people - not for you.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Interestingly nobody remembers Google did just that a few years ago merging their YouTube (a purchase again), Gmail, Maps, Search, Android, etc. accounts. And at the time, the user couldnt even refuse without loosing access to their services...
And now we are mad at Facebook?
I just opened WhatsApp on my Android device, and saw the notification for the new Terms of Service.
I clicked the "Read" link, and was presented with the giant Agree button, but also a checkbox stating:
"Share my WhatsApp account information with Facebook to improve my Facebook ads and product experiences. Your chats and phone number *will not* be shared onto Facebook regardless of this setting."
Upon unticking this checkbox, a message stating that account info won't be used to improve products or experience.
I was initially relieved by this, but the second sentence of the quoted statement above doesn't reassure me.