Sadly WhatsApp will start sharing your account information with Facebook. You can’t prevent Facebook getting the data, you can only opt-out of them using it for ads.
Tag: WhatsApp
Comparing Signal-protocol-using messengers
There’re still privacy differences when you compare messenger apps all using the Signal protocol:
In this article, I’m going to compare WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo from a privacy perspective.
While all three apps use the same secure-messaging protocol, they differ on exactly what information is encrypted, what metadata is collected, and what, precisely, is stored in the cloud — and therefore available, in theory at least, to government snoops and wily hackers.
In the end, I’m going to advocate you use Signal whenever you can — which actually may not end up being as often as you would like.
WhatsApp End-to-end Encryption
WhatsApp just announced they enabled end-to-end encryption for all their users … this is huge news. They have put a white paper up describing their implementation. Good news: it’s based on the Signal protocol and first tests seem to suggest they did it properly. ?
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via WhatsApp to my wife ?
Digitalisierung durch WhatsApp
So wahr ? … WhatsApp hat so einige Teile meiner Familie digitalisiert, die sich davor sehr schwer damit getan haben.
Thank Goodness it’s Not in the App
Phew … WhatsApp denied that the app records calls made through it … they had me worried for a second. 😌
They Don’t Care About Your “Online” Privacy
Messenger apps show your friends’ online status. Anytime you open the app, they’ll notify the service that you’re “online” at the moment. Now everybody else can see it in their contact lists.
And with everybody I mean anybody! If you have a phone number you can check that person’s online status as often as you want from wherever you want (no need to be friends or anything).
So did a group of researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. They used this “feature” to “find out how frequently and how long users spent with their popular messenger” on a random sample of 1000 people in different countries for over eight months.
Looking through the project’s website should make it clear how little the creators of those apps care …
Moreover, we were able to run our monitoring solution against the WhatsApp services from July 2013 to April 2014 without any interruption. Although we monitored personal information of thousands of users for several months — and thus strongly deviated from normal user behaviour — our monitoring efforts were not inhibited in any way.
… and that they don’t want you to be able to care.
Unfortunately, affected messenger services (like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) currently provide no option for disabling access to a user’s “online” status. Even WhatsApp’s newly introduced privacy controls fail to prevent online status tracking, as users still cannot opt-out of disclosing their availability to anonymous parties.