The impossibility of banning encrypted communication? (news.ycombinator.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Forgive me if this is an obvious stupid question, but with all this talk (again) about the EU trying to force chat platforms to check the content of its messages, I can help but think: how are they ever going to prevent me and my friend from sharing public keys and using them to encrypt our messages to each other? In other words: how are they ever going to be able to ban encryption?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

whatsapp is not meaningfully e2ee

[-] FlappyBubble@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

In what sense? It's encryption is based on that of Signal. Are you referring to metadata? I also avoid whatsapp, but not because of the encryption.

[-] jjlinux@lemmy.zip 8 points 3 weeks ago

Even if it's based on Signal's encryption, it doesn't mean it's implemented as it is in Signal.

[-] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

Exactly.

They generate the keys, that's all you need to know in order to know that it isn't secure.

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

please share

[-] Chais@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 weeks ago

It's closed source. So it's impossible to verify Facebook doesn't have you pkey and goes MitM.
They say they don't, but you can only take their word for it.

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

i guess that fb does store keys after all; they do respond to police requests

i also found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/v7tsou/is_whatsapp_lying_about_its_endtoend_encryption/

Encryption in WhatApp is actually a fake, because the encryption keys are generated and stored on Facebook's servers, accordingly, they can read any of your messages as plain text, and the intelligence services obviously have access to them.

Also a few months ago there was a leaked slide from an FBI training course or something where they compared different messengers in terms of how well they cooperate with the police, guess who came first ?

WhatsApp provides data to the police in near real time (about 15 minutes from the time of the request)

The message from WhatApp at the beginning of the chat - that your data is not available to third parties is the height of hypocrisy.

this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025

56 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

41249 readers

527 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS