Facebook plans on backdooring WhatsApp

BriggsAndStratton · Aug 1, 2019

https://m.slashdot.org/story/359050

Reality · Aug 1, 2019

And if the "mighty" facebook keeps breathing out the term "backdoor" for a bit, it will become [more] acceptable very soon.

guest · Aug 1, 2019

Reality said: ↑

And if the "mighty" facebook keeps breathing out the term "backdoor" for a bit, it will become [more] acceptable very soon.
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i bet it will.

Minimalist · Aug 2, 2019

The WhatsApp Story Reminds Us Of The Leap Of Faith We Take With Closed Source Encryption

This past March, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg issued his “privacy-focused vision for social networking” in which he explicitly called out the need for Facebook to be able to identify harmful and illegal content being shared within the company’s end-to-end encrypted offerings, including WhatsApp, mentioning child exploitation imagery as one example of the kind of material the company absolutely must find a way of stopping. Two months later, the company spent time at its high-profile F8 developer conference to present its work on on-device content moderation in which content is filtered against blacklists and AI models directly on a user’s device without ever being accessible to Facebook itself.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevl...-faith-we-take-with-closed-source-encryption/

guest · Aug 2, 2019

Facebook Insists No Security ‘Backdoor’ Is Planned for WhatsApp
The company is fighting back against rumors that it would scan messages on users’ phones prior to encryption
August 2, 2019
https://onezero.medium.com/facebook...backdoor-is-planned-for-whatsapp-e9d7a298bb69

It is a claim Facebook unequivocally denies.
“We haven’t added a backdoor to WhatsApp,” Will Cathcart, WhatsApp’s vice president of product management, wrote in a statement provided to OneZero and previously posted to Hacker News.

“To be crystal clear, we have not done this, have zero plans to do so, and if we ever did, it would be quite obvious and detectable that we had done it.”
Although the app is not open-source, security researchers can download the Android application package (APK) and use third-party tools to get readable Java code back, or they can extract the binary code for the iPhone versions and use debuggers (such as IDA Pro) to try to understand how it works.

“I’m sure people are constantly looking at reverse engineering it,” says cryptographer Steve Weis, a fellow at the Aspen Tech Policy Hub and former software engineer at Facebook. “Generally you can assume that people are poking around the binaries.”
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Reality · Aug 2, 2019

After the constant shiftiness side-winding and deception within Facebook, how on earth anyone can believe anything it promises to do or not do is astounding.

guest · Aug 2, 2019

Reality said: ↑

After the constant shiftiness side-winding and deception within Facebook, how on earth anyone can believe anything it promises to do or not do is astounding.
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Because people are doubting their doubts and needs comfort from the thing they want.

Reality · Aug 3, 2019

@guest Taking comfort in abject lies is the epitome of deception.

guest · Aug 3, 2019

Reality said: ↑

@guest Taking comfort in abject lies is the epitome of deception.
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yep, i often recall this phrase "The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn’t Exist"

guest · Aug 3, 2019

More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp
August 2, 2019
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html

Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans.
The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a video presentation from a Facebook developers conference.
[...]
Blame accepted. But in general, this is the sort of thing we need to watch for. End-to-end encryption only secures data in transit. The data has to be in the clear on the device where it is created, and it has to be in the clear on the device where it is consumed. Those are the obvious places for an eavesdropper to get a copy.

Facebook desperately wanted to convince me to correct the record, while at the same time not wanting to write something on their own letterhead (just a couple of comments, so far)
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[...] while also reminding everyone that Facebook has broken so many privacy promises that they really can't be trusted.
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Reality · Aug 3, 2019

while also reminding everyone that Facebook has broken so many privacy promises that they really can't be trusted.
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...which can't be repeated enough, so hopefully people might get their thinking caps on to figure out why.

zapjb · Aug 3, 2019

fb is just adding more backdoors.

Minimalist · Aug 26, 2019

End-to-end encryption not essential to WhatsApp as a platform: Tamil Nadu Advocate General

“End-to-end encryption was introduced to WhatsApp later. Therefore, it is not essential to the platform. It was a business decision. It is a question of business policy versus law,” E. Manoharan, the Additional Government Pleader for the State of Tamil Nadu told MediaNama on the sidelines of the Madras High Court hearing on August 21.
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https://www.medianama.com/2019/08/2...pp-as-a-platform-tamil-nadu-advocate-general/

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