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

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[-] ISOmorph@feddit.org 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That's exactly what makes the proposed regulation so absurd. If you're not completely tech illiterate, you're gonna use whatever fork of your FOSS software of choice to keep communicating securely. This regulation is just a very obvious data grab for the whatsapp users that are too lazy to switch.

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

whatsapp is not meaningfully e2ee

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

please share

[-] Chais@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days 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 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[-] FlappyBubble@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days 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 7 points 2 days 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 2 days ago

Exactly.

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

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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025

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