There’s a difference between willingly handing over information and being required to by law, though, right?
I’m no Meta fan, but presumably if they were served a warrant they can’t just say no?
That’s one of the benefits of E2E encryption, where nobody but the users have the keys. The company can say no, because they simply don’t have access to see them.
Came here to say this. Without e2e encryption there’s no way for them not to. And most big companies like this are in bed with the federal government and wouldn’t really entertain that seriously.
Also they want to be able to scrape/sell your chat data so they don’t want to encrypt it.
It’s been a while since I looked it up, and I don’t use WhatsApp, but I believe it’s E2E encrypted but the mechanism they use allows their servers to also hold the keys to decrypt.
Presumably they hold a master key that all other keys are derived from.
Yes. This does make it very convenient to just hop on web.whatsapp.com without also having your phone online.
WhatsApp's fine for talking to normie friends who won't ever switch to something else, for managing business clients, etc. But it's something to be aware of.
The world would be a better place if we all used Signal, XMPP, etc.
How can we monetize the contents of people's direct messages to each other if we support encryption?
<checks notes>Oh. We can't. Decision made, then.
Signal protocol for all the things.
Only, then you can't get paid for snitching... (You get to charge the government for all those requests... and you basically get to set the price.)
Right. They could implement E2E encryption, they just don’t want to - entirely plausible it’s because they don’t want to say no.
More likely it’s because they want the data :)
Ah yes. All those fines and laws they regularly break, of course now is the time they'd be law abiding executives. Only when it means selling out some pleb and it doesn't hurt their profits. Then of course John Doe here who gets $0 for representing Meta on the web comes for the rescue of our great benefactors.
You’re straw manning. I didn’t say they act in good faith, but it’s important to make a distinction between them handing over the information and being made to.
For all I known they do hand it over willingly. I don’t know.
If they enabled it they wouldn’t have access to all of that information they can profit off of.
Technologically they could do it, they just don’t want to.
So it seems that the problem is with Meta and NOT them being a "good guy" but law forcing their hand?
Oh yeah they definitely aren’t to be seen as the “good guy” and they absolutely could make it impossible to hand over.
They are deciding to favour data/profits over people’s privacy.
BUT the distinction should still be made that they could be made to do it, regardless whether they want to.
Then there’s the whole other conversation around back doors (like the government asked Apple to do in their iPhones).
A lot of folks here seem concerned with it being lawfully ordered or voluntarily handed over. Which is kinda outside the point in my humble opinion. It's tantamount to asking if a slave catcher had a license.
Both the government and Meta are in the wrong here. And it's a very shitty moment for Meta to start caring about fines and regulations.
Every large company complies with data requests from the government. It is required and the fines for non-compliance are large. The only way around it is not storing anything at all.
So you are saying to avoid this immoral act, all they had to do was not commit another immoral act by implementing end to end encryption and not storing data... Yep, I completely agree with that.
If you think someone storing your chat and message data is immoral, how do you feel about this conversation here?
It's absolutely not outside the point and a totally relevant question. Regardless of your stance on the issue, compliance with legal procedures is absolutely essential to a functioning society. Calls for companies to defy the law just to support your favored political position are asinine and dangerous.
Or they could have... You know, foreseen their responsibility in safeguarding their users data, implemented end to end encryption and not mishandled their users data in the first place.
Data privacy and human rights are my favored political positions to be fair, so I do view the acts of the government and Meta to be immoral. And as such, I would say companies and governments imposing immoral laws is dangerous (and not in an asanine way).
I'm not calling for companies to defy the law to support my position anyway. I'm calling for companies to do the right thing and not store this kind of data in the first place. And I'm saying the fact that Threads does is wrong, and makes the platform not worth using regardless of if they were complying with a court order or not.
All right, fair enough, but I still think questions about whether or not Meta handed over the data in response to a legally enforceable request from the government vs. as a voluntary act based on their board's political views or something is a valid one. Meta doing it on their own certainly is politically-motivated "snitching," but if they're just complying with a government order, then the problem lies more with the government in this instance than with Meta.
I'd like to hope that in the future we ban these sorts of data collection things, but...I'm pretty pessimistic when it comes to this sort of thing.
You are basically saying "Meta should be a different company". I agree with you that they are terrible, but you wanting them to stop collecting data is like wanting oil companies to stop drilling.
Not basically, I am saying Meta should be a different company. Or at the very least, people should not use it.
Meta sucks and they don't respect their users privacy, but really the United States are falling backwards so hard, it's incredible.
That's interesting. So what would the appropriate response for Meta be when they are officially served a warrant?
It shouldn't be possible for Meta to hand over the data. There should be a wall of privacy between Meta and its users private messages. The company I work for doesn't even have access to customer accounts without the customer's permission.
Technically, unless that data is encrypted with only the end user having access to the key or is being held/mediated by a third party, they do have access. It's only company policy that's preventing access, and a court can shred that policy with a court order on a case by case basis. Same goes for the third party. The end user has to be the only one with the key.
Have I got news for you:
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/expanding-features-for-end-to-end-encryption-on-messenger/
It's late, they should've implemented it back when they took WhatsApp, but it's something. Meta definitely does not want to work with local law enforcement, bad for business.
It's because Signal is end to end encrypted. Same is true for WhatsApp and that's a Meta product, they can't hand over messages even if they wanted to.
Messenger is adding E2EE as well.
They say billion of users before they monetize, but with the amount of Instagram users that will most likely use threads they will reach that milestone fast and for now they are just collecting data.
This screenshot doesn't indicate whether they were complying with a lawful order or volunteered the information unprompted.
