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WhatsApp will serve ads and share data with Facebook

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  1. #21

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    But you can find similar articles about any other service. End of the day I have nothing to hide but I dont want facebook dominating everything I do on my phone.


  2. #22

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    Who owns whatsapp? Remind me again.


  3. #23

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    Original Post Deleted
    Yeah it uses the same encryption as Signal (which is damn solid, and open source for everyone to see and audit). And no, they can't read your messages. But they can read all the remaining metadata. X writes to Y at this time, with this frequency, and Y writes to all these people. Y has a tendency to write to these people while she is in this place. We can tie them neatly in friendship groups, also arranged by location.
    Given that we now have each of their numbers we can match them to their profiles and make new connections even though they're officially not friends in FB. The amount of crap you can do with only contacts and metadata of how those contacts interact is already scary enough.

    Remember when there was this congress hearing of FBI regarding all the privacy invasion, they kept saying "we only collect the metadata, not the conversation itself". Sure, they really don't need the exact words that are being sent/received, they can figure most of it just with metadata anyway.

    And regarding Telegram...Yeah, ex vKontakte CEO ousted by Putin (he says because there was a row where he didn't give the Kremlin info regarding some Ukranian and Maydan opposition groups), I believe living in the UK (but some weird purchased nationality). The software uses encryption by obfuscation. So you rather trust the dude (and I don't quite do). I'd use Signal...but then I'd be alone.
    Last edited by timonoj; 31-08-2016 at 09:11 AM.
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  4. #24

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    What is more worrying than Whatsapp is WeChat - installed it to message someone in China and was shocked to see how many of my friends have it.

    Given how much we use google and facebook, this is one of those things I'm going to let go. My private Facebook profile is not connected to my phone number anyways. With google, no choice - have to trust someone a little bit.


  5. #25

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    Yeah wechat is the big panda. It tracks way so much. Yet it's damn useful in China. You can do anything from book a taxi to buy cinema tickets or pay at seven eleven...You can do most of your daily stuff at wechat. Your life can turn around it. It's creepy as hell...but it works. Everybody locked in a golden cage.

    East_coast likes this.

  6. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by timonoj:
    Yeah it uses the same encryption as Signal (which is damn solid, and open source for everyone to see and audit). And no, they can't read your messages. But they can read all the remaining metadata. X writes to Y at this time, with this frequency, and Y writes to all these people. Y has a tendency to write to these people while she is in this place. We can tie them neatly in friendship groups, also arranged by location.
    Given that we now have each of their numbers we can match them to their profiles and make new connections even though they're officially not friends in FB. The amount of crap you can do with only contacts and metadata of how those contacts interact is already scary enough.

    Remember when there was this congress hearing of FBI regarding all the privacy invasion, they kept saying "we only collect the metadata, not the conversation itself". Sure, they really don't need the exact words that are being sent/received, they can figure most of it just with metadata anyway.
    You've pretty much nailed it.

    Nothing I say on IM is of interest to any company or individual. It's who I message and how often, that makes me another node of their relationship chart, that turns me into a company commodity.

    The Telegram vs WhatsApp divide is interesting. Most people I know are on WhatsApp. The only Telegram contacts I have tend to be tech-inclined and therefore a little more conscious of privacy, not in the "bad guys read my boring messages" sense, more the "I don't want to be sold as part of a package to advertisers" sense.

  7. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by HK_Katherine:
    Sadly this is exactly the problem. Friend of mine moved to it... I couldnt install it on my old blackberry so then we lost touch! Daft really. She won't Facebook or email or anything sensible.
    https://www.google.com/trends/explor...all&q=Telegram

    Telegram is getting a few more searches on Google. Networks take time to build...

  8. #28

  9. #29

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    Does anybody use faceboook ads to drive sales leads?


  10. #30

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    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/te...many.html?_r=0

    If other governments join in and start pushing Facebook on this, I could see FB going ahead merging WhatsApp straight into Facebook/FB Messenger to solve that problem.

    Isn't this in a way similar to what Google tried to do a while back forcing Google+ onto YouTube users so that the data is shared (some of your YouTube viewing history might be worth a lot to advertisers)?