Is WhatsApp bad for privacy?
And if so, why exactly? It says it's end-to-end encrypted. The metadata isn't. But what is metadata and is it bad that it's not? Are there any other problematic things?
I think I have a few answers for these questions, but I was wondering if anyone else has good answers/explanations/links to share where I can inform myself more.
Metadata is all the content of a message besides the actual text content of the message (i.e. what you type). Examples would be the date and time it is sent, what users these messages were sent to / from, and the IP addresses of both parties. (The availability of metadata varies from messenger to messenger).
I like this example: If you only text your Aunt Sally, who lives in Alaska, twice per year to wish her a happy birthday and Christmas, just by looking at the metadata someone could infer the meaning of your messages, as well as your relationship to the person you're messaging. To a point this is true about any messages you sent.
As for Whatsapp specifically, it being end-to-end doesn't really matter imo, as the application is not open source and is owned by an advertising / social media company. As long as the code is closed source, you cannot be sure:
At least for applications handling truly sensitive information (for the average person only their messenger and browser), you should be using open source software. The easiest recommendations I can make are:
Anyways, I hope this was a satisfactory answer.
I’m iffy on Brave as a recc but otherwise this comment is fantastic. Hope OP reads it over
Added an obligatory disable cryptocrap to make it slightly more bearable
That your messages are encrypted at all
That your encryption keys are kept on-device, and not plainly available to a centralized party
That the encryption the application is using is securely implemented
This is true, but something that should be noted is that, to my knowledge, no law enforcement agency has ever received the supposedly encrypted content of WhatsApp messages. Facebook Messenger messages are not E2E encrypted by default, and there have been several stories about Facebook being served a warrant for message content and providing it. This has, as I understand, not occurred for WhatsApp messages. It is possible, of course, that they do have some kind of access and only provide it to very high-level intelligence agencies, but there's no direct evidence of that.
I would personally say that it's more likely than not that WhatsApp message content is legitimately private, but I'd also agree that you should use something like Signal if you're genuinely concerned about this.
They would better hide those evidences as best as they can, or they would lose a useful source of informations.
That's the whole game of intelligence: to be a step ahead of the opponent, it must believe its safe so you can steal useful informations. As soon as the breach is discovered, it ceases to be useful.
If you log into WhatsApp on another device, does your history show up?
If it does, that means they hold your encryption keys on their server. It's the only way this could work.
It's why with Signal you need to maintain your keys and keep backups. No one else has your keys, so logging in to other devices won't get history without that backup and the keys.
Works this way with encrypted XMPP too, of course.
How do I know other browsers/messengers actually include the code that is published when they arrive on my phone? Wouldn't it be possible to simply add tracking/malicious code outside of the open-source repository, build an APK from it and put that on the Play Store instead of the "clean" code on the repository?
You could compile the software yourself, and the builds they do publish are reproducable, therefore any hidden malicious code would almost certainly be noticed in any popular application.
What use is this knowledge through metadata to them? Let's say I have no Facebook account and no other apps by Meta. There are no ads within WhatsApp. What do they gain by having this data about me?
They know your relationships with other people, and could infer things about you which will be stored in their servers regardless of whether you have a Facebook account, I believe if you search for "shadow accounts" you can read more about that
they can sell the information tied to your phone number or IP address to other companies, so they in turn now what ads to bombard you with.
The biggest problem is that it uploads your entire contact list and thus social network to Facebook. That alone tells them a lot about who you are, and crucially, also leaks this information about your friends (whether they use it or not).
With contacts disabled it's a pain to use (last time I tried you couldn't add people or see names, but you could still write to people after they contacted you if you didn't mind them just showing up as a phone number).
It still collects metadata - who you text, when, from which WiFi - which reveals a lot. But if both you and your contact use it properly (backups disabled or e2e encrypted), your messaging content doesn't get leaked by default. They could ship a malicious version and if someone reports your content it gets leaked, of course, but overall, still much better than e.g. telegram which collects all of the above data AND doesn't have useful E2EE (you can enable it but few do, and the crypto is questionable).
It's owned by Meta, you better forget about privacy lol!
Is Facebook bad for privacy?
Whatsapp is Facebook. Literally. Whatsapp sold themselves to Facebook.
So yes: it's bad for privacy.
TL;DR: Yes it is, it's terrible. What would you expect from a Facebook product? Use Signal instead.
Thank you, but I'm looking for actual arguments that would sway someone that is trying to come to a rational conclusion. "The reputation of the company is bad" is of course valid evidence, but it would be much more interesting to know what Facebook actually gains from having users on WhatsApp.
First, it is very likely that the WhatsApp encryption is compromised, it definitely shouldn't be trusted, as it is completely proprietary and thus not transparent to users and independent auditors. Also, unlike Signal, WhatsApp doesn't encrypt any metadata. The biggest source of WhatsApp user data for Facebook though are address books. When you grant WhatsApp permissions to access your contacts, that data is sent to Facebook servers unencrypted. That way, Facebook can see the names and phone numbers of all of your contacts. This is not just bad for you, it's also bad for everyone whose phone number you saved in your address book, their data is sent to Facebook, even if they don't use any Facebook services themselves. Also, when you have WhatsApp or any app installed on your phone, it by default has access to many things that you can't control or restrict. For example, it can access some unique device identifiers and look at stuff like the list of apps you have installed on your phone or access sensors like the gyroscope and accelerometer which can absolutely be used to track you. It's better to keep shady apps like those made by Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft or other surveillance corporations off your devices. Use FOSS alternatives with a proven track record like Signal if they are available.
It might be E2EE but it's not encrypted on your phone and it's closed source. How do you know they don't send the conversation data to their company? How do you know they don't get the encryption keys to decipher the messages for them?
How do you know they don't get the encryption keys to decipher the messages for them?
My guess is that they just capture keywords before you send it. They don't need to read the contents of the sent conversation when both parties to the conversation are using an app they own. They can detect keywords before sending, log and report them, then send the message encrypted. No need to retain encryption keys since they already extracted what they want.
Other apps may have code published in a repository, but the path from repository into the Play Store onto my phone is not clear. How do I know that they don't add extra tracking code on top during the build and release to the Play Store? With for example a popular alternate app, Signal?
You don't have to use the Play Store. You can either compile Signal yourself or use a trustworthy 3rd party build of Signal. Personally, I use Molly. It's Signal for Android but with some neat tweaks. It's not even available on the Play Store, it's exclusive to F-Droid and Accrescent. You can't do any of this with proprietary garbage like WhatsApp. Neither can you modify it to add features, nor can you look at the source code or compile it yourself.
Are you really asking about privacy of a Facebook's app?
Are you going to be flippant or help educate the person?
The answer is: Yes, WhatsApp is bad for privacy.
While the messages itself are encrypted, the WhatsApp App itself can still collect data from you from the Device your using it on:
And given this is a Meta owned company, we can probably assume they profile you from that.
Your address book is uploaded to Facebook servers when you use Whatsapp. And each time you interact, they know with who and link this information with other profiles and users of the Meta products.
It says it's end-to-end encrypted. The metadata isn't. But what is metadata and is it bad that it's not?
It's not just that. Their app can easily have tracking components that look for the list of installed apps, how often you charge your phone, how often are you on a WiFi network, etc.
Also, the app and any tracking component it has can also freely communicate on the wifi network. That doesn't only mean the internet, but the local, home network too, where they can find out (by MAC address, opened ports and response of the corresponding programs) what kind of devices you have, when do you have them powered on, what software you use on it (like do you use any bittorrent client? syncthing? kde connect? lots of other examples?), and if let's say your smart tv publishes your private info on the network, it does not matter that you have blocked LG (just an example) domains in your local dns server, because facebook's apps can just relay it through your phone and then their own servers.
If the app's code has been obfuscated, exodus privacy and others won't be able to detect the tracking components in it.
Are others different, like Signal and how do I know?
As a normal user I install both in exactly the same way, I have no way to verify that the code of the apk on the play store is exactly the same as the code published by Signal as open-source. How could I trust Signal more?
You can only know if you choose to read the code and compile from source. You can trust, in that your read the code and just install the app, or let others read the code for you. If reputable sources tell you it's good, most of the time it's good. How can you trust Signal more? Well you... shouldn't. You could try to use a decompilation tool, don't know if that works on Android's apps though.
Are others different, like Signal
Signal's encryption is sound, but there's an uncomfortable fact that it uses google play services dependencies (like for maps and other things, I think). There are articles (1, 2) that discuss that it has functionality that may allow an other process (the google play services process) to read the signal app's state or even directly it's memory because of that, which can mean the contents of the screen or the in-memory cache of decrypted messages.
Security audits often only audit the app's own source code, without the dependencies that it uses.
The google play services dependency could have a "flaw" today, or it could grow a new "feature" one day, allowing what I described above.
May or may not be connected, that Moxie (signal founder) is vehemently against any kinds of forks, including those that just get rid of non-free dependencies (like the google play services dependencies). The other comments of his are also telling.
Because of these, I have ruled for myself that I'll not promote them as a better system, and I'll not install Signal on my phone, because I think it gives a false sense of security, and for other things like still requiring an identity connected identifier (a phone number) for registration.
However if there were people whom I can only reach through Signal, there's Molly. They maintain 2 active forks, one of which is rid of problematic dependencies, and I would probably use that.
Molly-FOSS is not published on the official F-droid repository, but they have their own, so the F-droid app can still be used to install it and keep it updated.
and how do I know?
It's hard, unfortunately, and in the end you need to trust a service and the app you use for it.
F-droid apps are auditable, they are forbidden from having non-free (non-auditable) dependencies, and popular apps available in the official repository are usually fine.
With google play, again the truth is uncomfortable.
On Android, the app's signing key (a cryptographic key) makes it possible to verify that the app that you are going to install has not been modified by third parties.
Several years ago Google has mandated that all app developers are required to hand in their signing keys, so that google can sign the apps instead of them, basically impersonating them. Unfortunately this also means that unless the app's total source code is available (along with all the source code of it's dependencies), it's impossible to know if google has done modifications to the app that they make accessible on the google play store. This in itself is already a huge trust issue to me, but what is even worse is that they can just install custom modified versions for certain users on a case by case basis, with the same signing key that once meant that it was not modified by third parties like google, and no one will know it ever.
Just an example to show that the above is possible: the amazon web store similarly also requires the developer to hand over the app's signing key, and they admit in the documentation that they add their own tracking code to every published app.
If you're on Android, the E2E is meaningless as WhatsApp can read what you type, just as the Facebook app can, since they have keyboard access.
I don't know that they do this, just saying it's a leak point, and since it's Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg, well, let's just say I'm a bit cynical.
That's what they say. Meta Facebook already lied before countless times, so who knows.
(You can google Facebook lawsuits. The number of the results is scary.)
This image somehow is such low quality on my device that I can't read any of the text on it.
Yes.
WhatsApp Moderators Can Read Your Messages - https://gizmodo.com/whatsapp-moderators-can-read-your-messages-1847629241
Yes
E2E is not equal to Symmetric Encryption, which is the most private "one way" encryption meaning the user controls the data at the origin, and the messages can't be decrypted by anyone else.
WhatsApp is not the latter, so it is not private. Signal is symmetric, for example.
Care to elaborate? You can't just imply asymmetric encryption can be decrypted by 3rd parties and not explain how.
Also I don't know how exactly signal works but I know that you don't need to share secrets externally to message someone, so how are they exchanging the symmetric keys without using asymmetric encryption to boot?
This is more of a "how encryption" works question, so I'll just defer to some article response I got from Google which explains it simpler than I would:
"When someone sends a message to a contact over an app using the Signal protocol, the app combines the temporary and permanent pairs of public and private keys for both users to create a shared secret key that's used to encrypt and decrypt that message. Since generating this secret key requires access to the users' private keys, it exists only on their two devices. And the Signal protocol's system of temporary keys—which it constantly replenishes for each user—allows it to generate a new shared key after every message."
In the iOS Appstore you can see which data they want to obtain.
Whats the deal with IP address and Whatsapp? Like use a VPN ofc but still interested in what is known/felt about this matter
Not sure what you mean? It's a meta app, they can easily fingerprint your devices without the need of an IP address, VPN doesn't matter at all. If you access any Meta services from the same device, they know exactly who you are.
Jynx
Whatsapp is closed source and made by a advertising company. Wouldnt really count on that
Edit: Formatting
Saying they do E2EE but not doing it would be a literal massive scale fraud. Can't say I put Meta past those behaviors to be fair though lol
But as the other guy said, metadata is already a lot.
They would just say that they have a different definition of E2EE, or quietly opt you out of it and bury something in their terms of service that says you agree to that. You might even win in court, but that will be a wrist slap years later if at all.
“We just capture what you wrote and to whom before it gets encrypted and sent; we see nothing wrong with that” —Mark Zuckerberg, probably
They don't really need the actual contents of your messages if they have the associated metadata, since it is not encrypted, and provides them with plenty of information.
So idk, I honestly don't see why I shouldn't believe them. Don't get me wrong though, I fully support the scepticism.
All they need is the encryption key for the message, and it's not the message itself.
It can be fully end to end encrypted and still drop keyword-based metadata into the envelope. But also, I am pretty sure that the feds can access the keys if they need to. It's e2e encrypted, but that doesn't mean the key stays on your device.
This is what I came to express as well. Unless the software is open source, both client and server, what they say is unverifiable and it's safest to assume it's false. Moreover, the owning company has a verifiable and well known history of explicitly acting against user privacy. There is no reason to trust them and every reason not to.