I believe that those who are passionate about crypto currencies and block-chain technology in general also value their privacy and freedom .This is why I thought that this information about privacy and messaging cryptography would fit right in.
As many of you know, there has been a lot of public discussion and court action on Facebook's data policies including German court, Belgian court findings and Cambridge Analytica scandal. In short, all of those scandals are about Facebook's data stealing , privacy bending and last but not least- using data to sway political elections one or other way. More on their legal hearings here.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-s-2018-timeline-scandals-hearings-security-bugs-n952796 For those who dont know , Whatsapp was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $21.8 billion or at the time it would mean that they paid $55 per user ! This story is about Whatsapp and how Facebook will most likely destroy any shred of our privacy in the name of “ security of public” .
The whatsapp will be continuously – non stop scanning our messages and then if flagged by some keywords or something else, the messages will be sent to central system to be evaluated without users knowing what is happening. ..Facebook announced earlier this year preliminary results from its efforts to move a global mass surveillance infrastructure directly onto users’ devices where it can bypass the protections of end-to-end encryption.
In Facebook’s vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user’s device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted.
The company even noted that when it detects violations it will need to quietly stream a copy of the formerly encrypted content back to its central servers to analyze further, even if the user objects, acting as true wiretapping service.
Basically facebook will be wiretapping every phone which has whatsapp and using them. This makes me wonder, if this kind of behavior is acceptable for them, what kind of information they already are stealing from our phones with their facebook apps. Not a pleasant though.
Facebook’s model entirely bypasses the encryption debate by globalizing the current practice of compromising devices by building those encryption bypasses directly into the communications clients themselves and deploying what amounts to machine-based wiretaps to billions of users at once.
In addition they are not saying when they are going to implement this.
Asked the current status of this work and when it might be deployed in the production version of WhatsApp, a company spokesperson declined to comment. Of course, Facebook’s efforts apply only to its own encryption clients, leaving criminals and terrorists to turn to other clients like Signal or their own bespoke clients they control the source code of.
The problem is that if Facebook’s model succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before device manufacturers and mobile operating system developers embed similar tools directly into devices themselves, making them impossible to escape. Embedding content scanning tools directly into phones would make it possible to scan all apps, including ones like Signal, effectively ending the era of encrypted communications.
Governments would soon use lawful court orders to require companies to build in custom filters of content they are concerned about and automatically notify them of violations, including sending a copy of the offending content.
Maybe this is starting with the white and fluffy intentions of catching criminals and terrorists . But surely it will open some very dangerous doors for governments to monitor whatever they like. For example those who do not agree with their governments policies.. I believe that all this is done just to get access to more of our data, we all know how huge data market is grown, data and information is money! The more they know, the more precisely they can sell shit to us and sway our votes.
This new piece has me wondering if we are heading to cold controlled world Orvel describes in his book “1984’’ sooner than we can imagine..
Read the full article here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/07/26/the-encryption-debate-is-over-dead-at-the-hands-of-facebook/#490c1d675362 P.S. Hope that this section of forum is correct for this thread.
