How much worse is it privacy wise for me to give them access to my contacts?

  • Spectrism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 hours ago

    yes you can verity that it is secure by reverse engineering, just like someone can read the code, someone can reverse engineer it.

    No, you can’t, at least not reliably. Reverse engineering is nowhere near as simple as “just like someone can read the code”.

    It DOESN’T, they literally state that they don’t have encrypt metadata and can share it with other meta services

    I don’t keep up with whatever WhatsApp is doing, so nice to know that it’s already worse than I thought, but it doesn’t really change my point.

    which honestly as long as the messages themselves are encrypted is sadly still a much better option than sms

    If I could be certain that the messages are in fact encrypted as claimed, I’d agree.

    thanks for proving you don’t know, even the signal server doesn’t know ur contacts…

    They do, just not in the way you probably think. Unique identifiers (which phone numbers typically are) can always be used to track users, even if they’re just stored as a hash value on a server. They don’t immediately reveal the identity of a person like clear text phone numbers could do, but there’s still information that can be extracted through metadata analysis. Though to be fair, this discussion is more relevant to anonymity than to privacy.

    because it’d be above everything else and could see everything, no matter the sw ur using… so it’d be pointless anyways

    Why would it be pointless? If some random person broke into your home, would you just open all the doors because apparently doors are pointless? Having one entity spy on you is a weird excuse to let another one do the same. I mean… you do you, but I think it’s a weird mentality to have.

    Just like with whatsapp…

    Not really, as any unwanted traffic to WhatsApp’s servers would just get drowned within wanted traffic, making it effectively unnoticeable to the user. The same can’t be said for hardware that tries to connect somewhere despite no software on that device being allowed to connect to the internet.

    • dhkuq3645@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 hour ago

      No, you can’t, at least not reliably. Reverse engineering is nowhere near as simple as “just like someone can read the code”.

      sure, but someone would find out if WhatsApp didn’t e2ee their messages, which is the most important thing

      If I could be certain that the messages are in fact encrypted as claimed, I’d agree.

      Well you literally can be, because if it was not someone would find out instantly, it’d be a huge thing and meta would suffer greatly if they lied about e2ee

      They do, just not in the way you probably think. Unique identifiers (which phone numbers typically are) can always be used to track users, even if they’re just stored as a hash value on a server. They don’t immediately reveal the identity of a person like clear text phone numbers could do, but there’s still information that can be extracted through metadata analysis. Though to be fair, this discussion is more relevant to anonymity than to privacy.

      Sealed sender…, also signal is private, not anonymous, if you want both, simplex is ur friend

      Why would it be pointless? If some random person broke into your home, would you just open all the doors because apparently doors are pointless?

      well that’s not the same situation the robber wouldn’t see everything, the hw component would… also other doors have the function of keeping heat inside, not keeping robbers away

      Not really, as any unwanted traffic to WhatsApp’s servers would just get drowned within wanted traffic, making it effectively unnoticeable to the user. The same can’t be said for hardware that tries to connect somewhere despite no software on that device being allowed to connect to the internet.

      Well again if it did something like that, we would know thanks ro reverse engineering