undefined | Better HN

0 pointshigherpurpose10y ago0 comments

Zuckerberg actually cares a lot about his privacy. Yours? Maybe not as much.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2015/05/18/tech_...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2015/may/19/...

But isn't the PGP move a sign that Facebook cares about our privacy? Not really. The profile thing makes it easy to discover people who use PGP and email them with encrypted messages, but that has nothing to do with Facebook's content.

As for the encrypted notifications, Facebook can obviously still read those, and it can be useful to protect the data from Google. Also, if more people use PGP for email, that means less data for Google, so I could actually see this being a strategic move, too. Maybe not a huge one, but it doesn't cost Facebook too much to implement this, so why not?

I'll start thinking Facebook actually cares about my privacy when the Messenger uses Axolotl or OTR as well as ZRTP. Until then, I'll remain skeptical of Facebook's privacy intentions.

0 comments

minot10y ago

If I remember correctly, Open whisper systems, makers of TextSecure app say that Whatsapp[1] uses the text secure protocol[2]. This means that chats are encrypted end to end. It doesn't seem to expose information to Alice when Bob's keys change though. So someone could coerce Whatsapp into changing the keys for Alice and Bob and MITM that way. However, if we are worried about that we should also be worried about a rogue agent just updating the binaries for Whatsapp to remove such privacy-conscious decisions.

I guess the prevailing notion (as the grand parent said) is that while Facebook couldn't give two shits about our privacy, there are people who work there who do care about privacy in general (and not just their own privacy). Of course, no Facebook employee is going to come out publicly and call Mark Zuckerberg for being a self-serving psychopathic douche bag.

[1] (owned by Facebook, I imagine the deal is complete by now)

[2] https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/

> The most recent WhatsApp Android client release includes support for the TextSecure encryption protocol, and billions of encrypted messages are being exchanged daily. The WhatsApp Android client does not yet support encrypted messaging for group chat or media messages, but we’ll be rolling out support for those next, in addition to support for more client platforms. We’ll also be surfacing options for key verification in clients as the protocol integrations are completed.

> WhatsApp runs on an incredible number of mobile platforms, so full deployment will be an incremental process as we add TextSecure protocol support into each WhatsApp client platform. We have a ways to go until all mobile platforms are fully supported, but we are moving quickly towards a world where all WhatsApp users will get end-to-end encryption by default.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse