"All your data belongs to us" - Whatsapp is now completely Facebooked

What if someone doesn't have a FB profile, what exactly whatsapp going to do with his/ her data?
Can they really snoop into our personal conversations? What will they do with the useless info of two common nobody's chats?
Just came across the spreaed of pirated content in Telegram.
Don't you think it will be banned sooner or later?
They have shadow/ghost profile which zuck has made.
Source? It has opt-in E2EE afaik.
Your secrete chat feature is end to end encrypted.
 
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Search on Google and you will find lot of articles. Here is one. E2EE is not enabled by default on Telegram.

Also readup on https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication/. It is the authority on privacy centered tools.

There is too much misinformation floating around. Please stop recommending Telegram.
Very much true..Please stop recommending Telegram which does not have E2EE by default and its only enabled in secret chats as far as i know !

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Not really sure why this is even a discussion. Signal is open-source and run by a non-profit foundation. Telegram like WhatsApp is again run by a company dominated by an individual that has to find ways to earn money from its users.

I think it is plain laziness on the part of users. A lot of Telegram users joined it only because of all the piracy/sharing channels and now feel compelled to bring others to that platform rather than migrate to a better/secure one.
 
Not really sure why this is even a discussion. Signal is open-source and run by a non-profit foundation. Telegram like WhatsApp is again run by a company dominated by an individual that has to find ways to earn money from its users.

I think it is plain laziness on the part of users. A lot of Telegram users joined it only because of all the piracy/sharing channels and now feel compelled to bring others to that platform rather than migrate to a better/secure one.
How long will Signal be able to support people without monetizing, especially if most were to make the jump from Whatsapp. I would love if they were to have a payment model.
 
How long will Signal be able to support people without monetizing, especially if most were to make the jump from Whatsapp. I would love if they were to have a payment model.
Signal is a very small organisation. I will quote the funding from Wikipedia below. These are people who left other well-established companies in Silicon Valley and are well off even without considering how much they earn from Signal. Even operational costs are unlikely to cross the initial funding anytime soon. The irony is that the initial 50 mn that Whatsapp co-founder Brian put in came from FB.

Problem is that most people are blinded by corporations and expect everything to be corporate-like. Wikipedia has survived fine based primarily on donations and I make it a point to contribute even a few hundred bucks every year. I am pretty sure a lot of the new users will be inclined to contribute as well going forward.
The development of Signal and its predecessors at Open Whisper Systems was funded by a combination of consulting contracts, donations and grants.[197] The Freedom of the Press Foundation acted as Signal's fiscal sponsor.[37][198][199] Between 2013 and 2016, the project received grants from the Knight Foundation,[200] the Shuttleworth Foundation,[201] and almost $3 million from the US government–sponsored Open Technology Fund.[202] Signal is now developed by Signal Messenger LLC, a software company founded by Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton in 2018, which is wholly owned by a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation called the Signal Technology Foundation, also created by them in 2018. The Foundation was funded with an initial loan of $50 million from Acton, "to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal's mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous".[37][22][203] All of the organization's products are published as free and open-source software.
 
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As someone working closely with Information Security. This news does not come as a surprise to me. Poorly laid out data protection/privacy laws. Both American and Chinese companies have made a killing in India by sucking up data we freely hand over. We often forget that ad-free apps given to us for free are paid with our data.

Off topic but since you're in InfoSec, just wanted to ask this. What preventive measures could be taken against drive by downloads. Recently, one of the e commerce websites that I visit was found to have a malware infection. Could have really messed up my system if it hadn't been blocked.

WhatsApp is still end-to-end encrypted, so it is not as if they are going to snoop on the messages.
Is there any information on what crypto they use? I seriously doubt they'd design it to lock themselves out of the design. More likely, there is end to end crypto but the cipher keys are handled by them XD
The fact that all the founders of the companies FB has acquired left their companies soon after and advised against using their product speaks volumes about FB.
I really wasn't aware of this. Thought their life was all set after selling their companies to FB for millions.
 
Off topic but since you're in InfoSec, just wanted to ask this. What preventive measures could be taken against drive by downloads. Recently, one of the e commerce websites that I visit was found to have a malware infection. Could have really messed up my system if it hadn't been blocked.


Is there any information on what crypto they use? I seriously doubt they'd design it to lock themselves out of the design. More likely, there is end to end crypto but the cipher keys are handled by them XD

I really wasn't aware of this. Thought their life was all set after selling their companies to FB for millions.
WhatsApp officially simply mentions that they use "Signal encryption". While the Signal encryption is well documented, the problem is that it is impossible for anyone to verify it as they obfuscate the binaries. I understand Telegram's vested interests in pointing a finger at WhatsApp but what Durov said over a year ago is largely true. It is really easy for WhatsApp to have a backdoor in place because again no one can call them out.

The fact that WhatsApp stores messages in unencrypted form on third-party cloud services just indicates how easy it is for their communication to be accessible in an unencrypted form.

Also, a lot of media articles are erroneously listing Telegram as open-source, but only their API and apps are such. They use "open-source app" for misleading marketing. Also, the fact that chats are by default not E2E encrypted again indicates that they are not focused on privacy primarily but want to mention it in marketing by making secret chats E2E encrypted and not allowing them to be backed up. It is one thing to use Telegram for piracy but it is difficult to understand why people would want to use the same ID for daily communication.

Again, if you are really serious about moving away from WhatsApp for privacy concerns, then Signal makes the most sense. Unfortunately, even with the inertia, WhatsApp will continue to maintain the largest user base for several years, The worst part is that WhatsApp is following the model of WeChat in China where it has become the app for everything and allows the Chinese government to track a person's activities much more easily using a single app. This is where I believe the regulators have failed miserably.

One can only hope that uptake of Signal will increase when people realise that it is not worth sharing your personal data with a company like FB where you lose a lot more than you gain for a "free" app.
 
I actually wanted to ask about this comparison. Is it true?
I want an app which has a group feature in which only the admins can see the personal info like phone number of the group participants. I absolutely hate that anyone can see someone's number in WhatsApp groups and is the only reason why I'm not in any public group even if I want to.
Another thing which I only recently came to know is deactivating Whatsapp account also deleted everything (at least according to the app) including the backup files. I lost a lot of important conversations and other media files. It needs an option which doesn't do that and allows a user to restore those chat back to your account when the user wants to use WhatsApp again.
Earlier I used to export my chat to mail. I should've continued to do that. Sigh.
 
To just get the feel of waters outside the soon to be getting muddy whatsapp lake, [emoji6][emoji6] I have registered with signal and telegram both..
Lets see how many of my contacts will take the plunge...
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Telegram is worse than Whatsapp.

Group chats doesn't have any encryption and the desktop client (like Whatsapp Web) doesn't have any End-2-End encryption (except on Macs which has like less 10% of desktop OS market share).

If you're looking to enhance your privacy, Telegram is definitely NOT the one.
 
If you intend to use WA later, then make a local backup and only uninstall the app instead of deleting the account. I believe, this is the only means wherein you can retrieve your old conversations.
 
If you intend to use WA later, then make a local backup and only uninstall the app instead of deleting the account. I believe, this is the only means wherein you can retrieve your old conversations.
I understand that but the problem is if you don't deactivate your account others who have your number may think that your WhatsApp is still active as it will show up in their WhatsApp Contacts. That was why I deactivated it instead.
Also it doesn't matter if you use two SIMs on the same phone. Since I had WhatsApp active in both SIMs (I like to swap the numbers back and forth whenever I need to) I thought deactivating the account on one number would erase only that number associated with the account but it actually wiped out everything including the chat from the other SIM which I didn't intend to deactivate.
It was a painful experience.
 
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