Setting the record straight

To support your public commitment to privacy: OTR or better for WhatsApp, and&#x2F;or a third party client so we could do this, please.<p>I&#x27;ll excuse the metadata issues for a while if you build the app in such a way that confidentiality is protected independent of your infrastructure, and if pushing a &quot;bad&quot; app to clients is detectable. It&#x27;s still a pain if targeted malware is pushed to individual clients, as those clients are unlikely to detect it. There are some emerging ways to address that, but first things first.<p>You have literally billions of dollars; it would take at most millions to implement this. Making an app with 450 million uses around the world somewhat more secure would be supremely meaningful, even if it&#x27;s not perfect.

Facebook will use whatsapp for whatever purpose they see fit. A 19 billion acquisition is not a partnership. When that will happen deliberately, maybe a year from now, the founders will leave, maybe slamming the doors, and enjoy their riches for the years to come.

<p><pre><code> Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible: You don’t have to give us your name and we don’t ask for your email address. We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address. We don’t know where you work. We don’t know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that. </code></pre> I don&#x27;t recall them ever being accused of tracking all this information. The problem is the metadata; They know who you are talking to and for Facebook this is exactly the kind of information that they want. They want to enhance their social graphs and have a better view of who interacts with who. This is auspiciously lacking in their statement.

<i>If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.</i><p>With no disrespect intended towards the whatsapp team, given the terms of the deal, it&#x27;s a bit hard for them to say &quot;If partnering with Facebook meant X we wouldn&#x27;t have done it&quot; unless X is &quot;life would not have been as staggeringly beneficial to us&quot;.

Wow. Not the response I expected. I&#x27;m not sure if the naivety is authentic or we should feel punked. They didn&#x27;t partner with anyone. They were bought. Not changing will be allowed as long as it benefits the buyer.

<p><pre><code> ...said every acquisition ever</code></pre>

&gt; You don’t have to give us your name<p>Ok, is that another way of saying they know it already since it was in another users contacts that got synced to there server?

provided you have whatsapp and facebook on your phone the following happens though.<p>1. they both know your mobile phone book.<p>2. they both know your imei<p>3. they both know your phone number(this doesn&#x27;t have to be the same by the time you sign up for the other)<p>just no.1 is already enough to get an accurate estimate on who the person is. notice how they never said that they didn&#x27;t log that information?<p>it&#x27;s also very unlikely that they don&#x27;t have access logs to their service, which usually includes ip&#x27;s i.e. location, but for all we know they could be encoding carrier information in a couple of bytes during the transmission of the contact list.<p>edit: while the mobile ip&#x27;s don&#x27;t give you exact information, they still give you enough heuristics to overlap them with other services

This may sound naive, but I genuinely believe that Whatsapp cares about user privacy and that they won&#x27;t silently mine our data and send it to Facebook. That would amount to sheer hypocrisy, and could also come under legal scrutiny. I also think that Zuckerberg, at some level, really does want to connect the world and all that, and Whatsapp is a much better bet than Facebook is, for developing countries. That being said, Whatsapp does need to improve their security, and irrespective of the facts, this is proving to be a bit of PR disaster for them, with a mass exodus of users to Telegram. (They&#x27;d do well to nick some features from Telegram).

Right, whatsapp doesn&#x27;t collect private information. You just can&#x27;t use it unless you hand over all of your contacts!

Discussion from half a day ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7416717" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7416717</a>

<p><pre><code> &quot;Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA&quot; </code></pre> This post is complete nonsense, and has no value at all because their words don&#x27;t match their actions. A company that respects privacy wouldn&#x27;t partner up with another company best known for infringement of privacy.<p>Suit the word to the action.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. It really doesn&#x27;t matter what Jan wants, Zuckerberg is the decider.

&quot;None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that.&quot; ... but I&#x27;m not promising we won&#x27;t!

So there <i>is</i> an exodus. Interesting.

Why partner with Facebook then? They act as if they did not expect this kind of reaction from the public.

I have been meaning to ask this.<p>What encryption does Whatsapp use? Their FAQ doesn&#x27;t say.<p>It also doesn&#x27;t say if it is end-to-end (client-to-client) encryption or if the data is stored in plain on their servers? (I understand it is not stored permanently.)

If what he&#x27;s saying here is true, then Facebook would have had no reason to spend all that money acquiring Whatsapp.

OK, so if all this is true, what did the worlds premier data broker actually pay $19 billion for?

Open letters mean nothing. TOS or it didn&#x27;t happen.

How dare you spout such obvious tripe?! You have no say anymore, STFU and stop misleading people!