I find the wordsmithery on Meta's statement the most interesting:
“We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”
If you read around their points, it sounds like they track general location, log group messages, and provide specific information on request to a government.
Meta can also just lie about it. If they were secretly granting backdoor root access to some NSA spooks, like Microsoft did with PRISM or AT&T did with 641A, most likely no one would find out, so, there'd be zero actual downside to simply lying.
I think group messages would still be considered personal. It would only be messages you send to a business or in a group with a business that wouldn't be personal.
Meta works by identifying users, modelling their behavior, and then combining that data with third party sources (typically your financial activities) and then selling access to that data to third parties. Mostly for advertising.
When you use credit or debit cards your transactions and data related to it is collected and sold. When you apply for mortgages and close on a house all that information you put in there is collected and sold.
When you put your address in for the post office, when you apply for a drivers or fishing license... Your local governments collect that information and sell access to it.
Meta tries to then tie in your online and app/phone activity with your legal/financial identity it can obtain through partner data brokers.
This is Facebook's businesses model.
So, yes, this data is available to pretty much anybody that is willing to pay for it. Which includes governments.
None of this should be surprising to anybody at this point. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.. all of these companies will do this to greater or lesser extents nowadays since has worked out so well for Meta's bottom line.
This is just a lie. I personally know somebody who worked at meta and they had a whole set of teams dedicated to building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries
Now I don't know the exact details of which governments had which access (was it just for warrants, which nations, what was the line between actual terrorist versus persecuting journalists), but there was absolutely bulk export and the fact that they are lying about it makes me inclined to presume the worst.
Remember Snowden outlined the Google<>US government interface:
The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.
If yes - FISA warrant was required
If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).
In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.
* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)
Isn't it more likely that Meta has been infiltrated by Mossad, just as they no doubt have by other intelligence services and they use these insiders to exfiltrate location data on specific targets?
> building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries
While I can totally imagine that governments would mass-export data, and I don’t doubt your friends claim, I can also imagine more innocent interpretation of this work.
I once worked on a large company’s GDPR data-export project. It was a large enough company that it also had a dedicated team to handle legal requests regularly from government(s). GDPR exporting needs to work “at scale” for all accounts, without human-in-the-loop work, and without causing any load issues to running services. The same system also handled legal requests, where the legal team could get an export for a user (almost) identically to the process of a user getting their own data. The legal team had tools set up to work with warrants, subpoenas and similar (internationally) legal data requests from courts and law enforcement. It looks like a “mass export” system, because it was, but it wasn’t used in “bulk requests” from the legal system.
> In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them. Additional information about WhatsApp's security can be found here.
Note specifically "information about how some users interact with others on our service", which contradicts their claim they don't keep logs of which people are messaging each other.
I think rdrd just missed that piece of the fine wordsmithing - so long as there's at least one person not included in that "some users", then "we don’t keep logs of who EVERYONE is messaging" is still true.
This is the company that built a secret localhost listener on Android so that they could track users across websites even in private mode. Do not believe this for a second.
I'm much more inclined to believe they track everything in high precision and also MITM all the messages. Especially now that they are inserting ads.
I'm no apologist for Facebook, none of whose services I use. But get your facts straight. They are not 'inserting ads' in your chats, as you imply. AFAIK they are adding adds to the never-used 'Updates' tab.
Annoying from an ad perspective, no doubt. Vastly different from a are-they-MITMing-your-messages perspective.
If they log IP addresses, they can't say they don't log location at all.
> we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging
Seems like a pretty strong claim
> we do not track the PERSONAL messages people are sending one another
I don't know much about their business offering, but it seems likely it's not e2e encrypted or has some kind of escrow. Businesses often multiple people to be able to access an account and that is best done without e2e encryption... let alone auditing requirements.
> We do not provide BULK information to any government
Because they are subject to subpoena and search warrants. They are legally required to provided tailored information to governments.
====
All in all it's pretty much what you'd expect for Whatsapp's "e2e but otherwise conventional saas" approach. If you want better, use signal.
In general, all your personal information stored with Google or Apple or any other American company is subject to getting requested by a court order. If you listen to any of the True Crime podcasts, you'll always hear how google searches and cell tower location are always presented in a trial as evidence. People here always think they are so smart saying
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who made that search query.
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who had that cellphone around that cell tower. Could have been anybody. I could have been hacked.
Judges always allow those evidence and jury always views it as incriminating. What makes more sense, that some unknown hacker hacked into your account and googled something about the thing you're here for, or that you actually just googled it yourself?
Definitely, but they don't have to contain any (plaintext) message content for encrypted messengers.
On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.
The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.
Additionally the NSA has all Meta and WhatsApp servers directly tapped and can just harvest data, oops i mean 'meta data', that way. Then just pass that info to Israel when their internal systems get an alert on good intel.
IME, they're stored on device only. If you've ever moved phones this becomes painfully obvious unless you've setup backups to your personal Google Drive (native integration with app).
I'm not saying I believe their statement, but in principle they could be storing messages indexed by recipient and have the sender id be part of the encrypted content? Then you can drop messages in each user's inbox as they arrive, from which the user's app can read, but not have stored enough information to retroactively query "Show me everyone Alice has talked to"?
It’s a lie. Russia Ukraine war demonstrated clearly that everything you write in whatsapp, your location, any photo etc are easily accessible and monitored in real time by USA government and their three letter agencies.
That's doubly suspicious, so they can, by that statement readily hand over your imprecise other-than-personal messages at an individual level to the Israelis.
This isn’t some conspiracy, it’s just CYA. They know your general location from your IP and device APIs, they don’t encrypt business messaging, and they comply with subpoenas.
Lots of largely baseless speculation here about WhatsApp MITMing end-to-end encrypted chats and other hypotheticals, when the most likely government access path is right there in the open:
WhatsApp heavily nudges users into backing up their chats to iCloud or Google Drive. These backups are, by default, unencrypted (or at least encrypted using a key known to Meta). And most users just use the defaults.
It's exactly the same story with iMessage: If "iCloud Backup" and "iMessage in the cloud" are activated (again, Apple nudges users into these by default), all received messages get uploaded to Apple using a key available to Apple, unless "Advanced Data Protection" is also enabled (decidedly not the default).
Users can deviate from these defaults (and both parties to a conversation need to, for the conversation to actually be private!), but they can already also just use Signal if sufficiently motivated.
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
Israel doesn't even need Whatsapp to be installed.
The IDF's Unit 8200[1] can probably hack most phones in Iran. And if not any of the private companies selling spyware software like the NSO Group[2 and 3].
How do you send an "invisible" SMS to other country's cellular network undetected? Especially on a mass scale...
I know about OMA DM, and FOTA update/access, and binaries certain US operators pre-install into phones/modems for remote access, etc. since I was reverse engineering this stuff. I just don't see how this would be invisible from the targetted country's cellular network operator.
I think that that's the excuse the current regime in Iran is using to try to prevent iranians from coordinating a coup.
By "chance" the rightful crown prince (Pahlavi dynasty), an exile, is now making a comeback on social media, saying that the current iranian regime shall fail.
There are talks online as to how the current regime is falling: and there are a lot of people who would be very happy to see those bearded men ruling by sharia law gone.
The last thing the religious cracknuts at the helm of that islamic state want are iranians themselves using the opportunity to topple up the regime.
When they say: "Delete WhatsApp to not help Israel locate you" what they really mean is "Do not share the vids of the crown prince announcing he'll give you a life without sharia punishment".
There's good reason to believe lots of western apps have back doors, if not backdoors served to countries like Iran from app stores.
Also car tech and cameras. Literally a wet dream if I worked at a three letter agency, real time surveillance of streets which is actually extremely difficult normally. Can't think of how many times I've wanted a recent picture of a street or house miles away, with 360 car cameras you can track people, see changes maybe from just minutes ago.
I don't know why these countries don't block or mandate these features are completely turned off.
> There's good reason to believe lots of western apps have back doors
A common sentiment in this thread. My gut and practical experience both tell me this is true on some level, but how do folks distinguish tinfoil hat conspiracy from legitimate speculation?
>but how do folks distinguish tinfoil hat conspiracy from legitimate speculation?
Plausibility and evidence, for which there's plenty in this case.
Although it seems less likely to me that Western apps have backdoors and more likely that Western law enforcement and intelligence have free access to the data, but it's probably both.
I'm surprised reading that the Iranian's regime concerns are centered on WhatsApp sharing information with Israel. It is much more likely that WhatsApp have 0-day vulnerabilities used by the Mossad to gain the info than WhatsApp actively sharing it.
> Iran banned WhatsApp and Google Play in 2022 during mass protests against the government
So more than fearing Israel, they actually fear the public that has an encrypted communication channel that can't be tapped by their police. Explains a lot.
Russian soldiers participating in SMO reported multiple times that after they exchange texts and photos with their relatives in WhatsApp, that information ends up in Ukrainian military HQs next day. With photos. And later used, for example, to harass the relatives of the soldier.
Could be some other mechanism (e.g. Google Drive or some other kind of malware), hard to be sure in the world, where since 2011 Snowden's revelations, bugs are placed my NSA and CIA everywhere, starting from hardware and firmware.
Russian soldiers chatting with their family know what precisely happens in the Ukrainian military HQ the next day? That sounds too crazy to be even remotely true, and too convenient a story ("they are harassing your family, go murder someone").
I’m not sure if Iran’s claim is true, but honestly, I’ve always felt uneasy about what these apps actually log. End-to-end encryption is great, but it doesn’t protect metadata.
The real issue is that we’re still guessing. Does anyone actually feel confident about any of this?
Nope. If Meta is involved they're getting their beak wet in as many ways as they can. Promoting the fact that WhatsApp has "end to end encryption" may be true, but that just means all the other good, privacy promoting, consumer-oriented things they could also be doing: they're not doing.
Readit News
“We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”
When you use credit or debit cards your transactions and data related to it is collected and sold. When you apply for mortgages and close on a house all that information you put in there is collected and sold.
When you put your address in for the post office, when you apply for a drivers or fishing license... Your local governments collect that information and sell access to it.
Meta tries to then tie in your online and app/phone activity with your legal/financial identity it can obtain through partner data brokers.
This is Facebook's businesses model.
So, yes, this data is available to pretty much anybody that is willing to pay for it. Which includes governments.
None of this should be surprising to anybody at this point. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.. all of these companies will do this to greater or lesser extents nowadays since has worked out so well for Meta's bottom line.
group messages and messages (metadata),
messages to business accounts (these they can read in full as the client send to a meta owned private key),
and who forwards media to who (deduplication and cdn)
and links (thanks to previews)
and it scans and uploads your contact list in full all the time.
The real question is where they draw the line, not if they do it ever.
Now I don't know the exact details of which governments had which access (was it just for warrants, which nations, what was the line between actual terrorist versus persecuting journalists), but there was absolutely bulk export and the fact that they are lying about it makes me inclined to presume the worst.
The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.
If yes - FISA warrant was required
If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).
In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.
* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)
While I can totally imagine that governments would mass-export data, and I don’t doubt your friends claim, I can also imagine more innocent interpretation of this work.
I once worked on a large company’s GDPR data-export project. It was a large enough company that it also had a dedicated team to handle legal requests regularly from government(s). GDPR exporting needs to work “at scale” for all accounts, without human-in-the-loop work, and without causing any load issues to running services. The same system also handled legal requests, where the legal team could get an export for a user (almost) identically to the process of a user getting their own data. The legal team had tools set up to work with warrants, subpoenas and similar (internationally) legal data requests from courts and law enforcement. It looks like a “mass export” system, because it was, but it wasn’t used in “bulk requests” from the legal system.
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From https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967/?locale=en_US:
> In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them. Additional information about WhatsApp's security can be found here.
Note specifically "information about how some users interact with others on our service", which contradicts their claim they don't keep logs of which people are messaging each other.
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I'm much more inclined to believe they track everything in high precision and also MITM all the messages. Especially now that they are inserting ads.
I'm no apologist for Facebook, none of whose services I use. But get your facts straight. They are not 'inserting ads' in your chats, as you imply. AFAIK they are adding adds to the never-used 'Updates' tab.
Annoying from an ad perspective, no doubt. Vastly different from a are-they-MITMing-your-messages perspective.
"WE don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging..."
"We don't KEEP logs of everyone who is messaging..."
"We don't keep logs of EVERYONE who is messaging..."
Etc.
> We do not track your PRECISE location
If they log IP addresses, they can't say they don't log location at all.
> we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging
Seems like a pretty strong claim
> we do not track the PERSONAL messages people are sending one another
I don't know much about their business offering, but it seems likely it's not e2e encrypted or has some kind of escrow. Businesses often multiple people to be able to access an account and that is best done without e2e encryption... let alone auditing requirements.
> We do not provide BULK information to any government
Because they are subject to subpoena and search warrants. They are legally required to provided tailored information to governments.
====
All in all it's pretty much what you'd expect for Whatsapp's "e2e but otherwise conventional saas" approach. If you want better, use signal.
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who made that search query.
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who had that cellphone around that cell tower. Could have been anybody. I could have been hacked.
Judges always allow those evidence and jury always views it as incriminating. What makes more sense, that some unknown hacker hacked into your account and googled something about the thing you're here for, or that you actually just googled it yourself?
On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.
The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Surely they must, how else are the messages… you know… available when you use the app?
just selected people then?
"This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service."
WhatsApp heavily nudges users into backing up their chats to iCloud or Google Drive. These backups are, by default, unencrypted (or at least encrypted using a key known to Meta). And most users just use the defaults.
It's exactly the same story with iMessage: If "iCloud Backup" and "iMessage in the cloud" are activated (again, Apple nudges users into these by default), all received messages get uploaded to Apple using a key available to Apple, unless "Advanced Data Protection" is also enabled (decidedly not the default).
Users can deviate from these defaults (and both parties to a conversation need to, for the conversation to actually be private!), but they can already also just use Signal if sufficiently motivated.
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
The IDF's Unit 8200[1] can probably hack most phones in Iran. And if not any of the private companies selling spyware software like the NSO Group[2 and 3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group
[3] https://mepc.org/commentaries/israeli-cyber-companies-overvi...
I recommend the documentary Zero Days from 2016 to anyone remotely interested on this.
How do you send an "invisible" SMS to other country's cellular network undetected? Especially on a mass scale...
I know about OMA DM, and FOTA update/access, and binaries certain US operators pre-install into phones/modems for remote access, etc. since I was reverse engineering this stuff. I just don't see how this would be invisible from the targetted country's cellular network operator.
By "chance" the rightful crown prince (Pahlavi dynasty), an exile, is now making a comeback on social media, saying that the current iranian regime shall fail.
There are talks online as to how the current regime is falling: and there are a lot of people who would be very happy to see those bearded men ruling by sharia law gone.
The last thing the religious cracknuts at the helm of that islamic state want are iranians themselves using the opportunity to topple up the regime.
When they say: "Delete WhatsApp to not help Israel locate you" what they really mean is "Do not share the vids of the crown prince announcing he'll give you a life without sharia punishment".
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Also car tech and cameras. Literally a wet dream if I worked at a three letter agency, real time surveillance of streets which is actually extremely difficult normally. Can't think of how many times I've wanted a recent picture of a street or house miles away, with 360 car cameras you can track people, see changes maybe from just minutes ago.
I don't know why these countries don't block or mandate these features are completely turned off.
A common sentiment in this thread. My gut and practical experience both tell me this is true on some level, but how do folks distinguish tinfoil hat conspiracy from legitimate speculation?
The UK now has laws to gag domestic companies and force them to implement backdoors.
I mean, nothing Snowden revealed was shocking to anyone in IT at the time. He just brought receipts.
Plausibility and evidence, for which there's plenty in this case.
Although it seems less likely to me that Western apps have backdoors and more likely that Western law enforcement and intelligence have free access to the data, but it's probably both.
The NSA, and it's partners, capabilities and the lengths it is willing to go to are staggering.
they don't. that's the whole point
So more than fearing Israel, they actually fear the public that has an encrypted communication channel that can't be tapped by their police. Explains a lot.
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Could be some other mechanism (e.g. Google Drive or some other kind of malware), hard to be sure in the world, where since 2011 Snowden's revelations, bugs are placed my NSA and CIA everywhere, starting from hardware and firmware.
if it was it would be true for telegram as well.
Russian soldiers participating in the invasion of Ukraine. FTFY.
The real issue is that we’re still guessing. Does anyone actually feel confident about any of this?