WhatsApp's new privacy policy is so bad it might be illegal
That big privacy policy update everyone was complaining about was--again--only about providing hosted e2e clients in the cloud for Facebook Business customers, and had nothing to do with end user to end user chats: the goal was to solve the experience problem of a company wanting to provide a chatbot and realizing &quot;omg, I have to host all of the chat client parts myself and build some way for random people in my organization to get access to it?!&quot;. The updates were all clearly narrowly targeted towards that--including to the security document, which merely <i>moved</i> the statement that data was encrypted (as opposed to removing it, which some people claimed)--and Facebook representatives <i>immediately</i> provided explicit clarification of all of this, but no one cared and everyone caused this massive denigration of WhatsApp... one that is apparently continuing, as this doesn&#x27;t seem to be anything new they changed?<p>Here is a comment with some defense of all of this, for those who were only reading the big headlines:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25875802" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25875802</a><p>And for what: so that the only mass-market end-to-end encrypted messaging tool could be discredited? And we could prove to large companies &quot;we don&#x27;t care if you are end-to-end encrypted: in fact, we will punish you harder if you are end-to-end encrypted than if you are just a normal service!&quot;?!? Where is all the continued outrage over Snapchat, the service we actually should be trying to replace with an e2e encrypted alternative (but for which Signal is an insufficient replacement as a big reason people like Snapchat is that you don&#x27;t have to give your real phone number to the random people you talk to online)? While some people remind us that Telegram sucks, where are the weekly threads and news articles about how horrible Telegram is? Why are groups like Signal targeting advertising at WhatsApp instead of at Telegram? Hell: why is everyone so upset over WhatsApp, but no one ever mentions Facebook Messenger in any of these articles or rants?<p>And let us not forget the cherry on top of this whole thing: that right after everyone decided to do this massive mobilization to cause the great exodus from WhatsApp--only some of those people of course ending up on Signal, with some reasonable number likely moving to Snapchat or Telegram or even Facebook Messenger--Signal decided they had a great moment to launch MobileCoin... a cryptocurrency whose claim to fame is being built on broken-by-design DRM technology (Intel SGX &#x2F; ARM TrustZone) and which--whether you think cryptocurrency is a good idea (which I do) or not--has managed to undermine confidence not only in the only big open source end-to-end encrypted messenger (by both clouding its motives and tying it to cryptocurrencies, which many end users consider to be a scam) but which has now soured everyone&#x27;s opinion (maybe correctly) of the privacy community (due to the recent push to use it). This is all just so infuriating as someone who wants people to universally have end-to-end encryption :&#x2F;.<p>(FWIW, if there <i>is</i> something new here--something that Facebook is now suddenly doing that is <i>actually bad</i>, unlike before--I&#x27;m very curious, but am going to note that all of the above is now the reason why I&#x27;m even past the point of caring enough than to skim a few paragraphs to verify &quot;this is part of the same FUD from a couple months ago&quot;: you can only cry wolf so many times before even the super technical people like me are no long going to care. But this just seems to now be &quot;great, government is now going to step in and <i>also</i> punish WhatsApp for having the gall to have bothered to build an end-to-end encrypted messaging app and then be carefully transparent about the process by which they add a new feature that just shouldn&#x27;t be considered a big problem&quot;. When this same politician decides to sanction Snapchat or Telegram for the way they handle privacy--or goes after Facebook Messenger or Instagram--I&#x27;ll be excited, but this is going to <i>harm</i> the efforts for end-to-end encryption, not help them!)