SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
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Meta writes the software that runs on the other end, and it’s closed source. Therefore for all we know, the message is end-to-end encrypted, and the moment it is decrypted on the other end Meta can send it back to their servers or use it for advertising. Unless the client at the end is open source and audited, E2E doesn’t mean much imo
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No I think you’ve missed their point. E2EE is end-to-end encryption, as in the message can’t be intercepted in the middle but it’s unencrypted at the end so you can read it. Because the WhatsApp app is closed-source you don’t know that it doesn’t immediately read the message and send the content to Facebook. It probably doesn’t, but it could! E2EE itself means that some third party can’t read your message in transit, though to be fair closed-source again means we just have to trust Facebook when they say WhatsApp uses E2EE.
So, this isn’t quite as valid a fear as you seem to think. There will be a lot of very smart people analyzing the shit out of what the app appears to be sending to Facebook servers. True it’s closed source but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to catch them doing fucked up shit. How do you think we currently know about things they do like this? Do you think Facebook told security experts just to be nice? Or do you think the experts figured this shit out on their own?
Sure, good point. But you do agree that it’s harder to trust something that explicitly hides from you what it is doing?
Oh I agree they’ll do every bad thing they can get away with. I just think they wouldn’t get away with decrypting the message and sending it straight to FB
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If somebody hands me a black box, tells me what’s inside, how is the burden of proof on me? I have to trust them blindly until somebody proves that there is something bad in the black box? No, I ask for a transparent box in the first place.
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That’s not it. It’s E2EE but Meta gathers all the metadata from Whatsapp including who you contact, when, where, how large the messages are, what times you’re online and for how long, phone numbers, names etc. That’s plenty of info to create a profile on users and their connections with each other, as is Facebook’s MO.
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