972
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
972 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59414 readers
1002 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they'd not be caught, because it's an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.
Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I'm a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?
WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free ~~encrypted~~ messaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they're charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn't come free and unlimited on most plans).
It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There's already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn't because they simply don't store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they're encrypted by design.
Ops, my bad. I was under the impression the only reason WhatsApp is encrypted today is because they already were by the time FB bought them.
They paid US$ 20B to buy WhatsApp, and encryption is a major deterrent for them scanning all messages to enhance their targeted advertising business.
Maybe you're right, but I'd be hesitant to say WhatsApp user's contacts list would be worth US$ 20B.
My theory is they bought WhatsApp just because it was organically growing to be the dominant messaging app, and Facebook didn't want to lose this marked and bought them to squash the competition.
The WhatsApp Business stuff is a more recent development. When FB bought them they had very little to work with.