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Comment by nbvt45 | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp is E2E encrypted

You trust that? I do not. Perhaps my tin foil is showing from under my hoodie, but the incentive is to collect data, or else... what?

And also closed source, so no real way of auditing this promise.

You can audit the binary. It's not a magic black box.

The server part as well?

If you can be sure that the part running on your phone encrypts the message, then it doesn't matter as much what's running on the server. Anyway being open source wouldn't improve the auditability of the server.

The whole point of it being E2E encrypted is that you don't need to audit the server. As long as it's implemented correctly on the client, both users verified the shared key out-of-band, and both users have enabled the option to warn when the shared key changes, the most the server can do is traffic analysis or denial of service.

Do you trust that the source code for the Signal iOS app on Github is the source code of the application you're running on your phone? All you really have to go on is the word of each company.

> Do you trust that the source code for the Signal iOS app

On one hand, we have moxie and a team of people with no evidence against their integrity. On the other hand, a culture that responds to criticism with aggression [1] and then responds to criticism of that by deleting their communications [2].

TL; DR It's reasonable to trust Signal's iOS closed-source app while distrusting Facebook Messenger's also closed-source secret mode app.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/technology/facebook-leake...

[2] https://fortune.com/2018/03/31/facebook-employees-are-report...

True, this is indeed a problem. I'm mostly trusting debian and f-droid, both non-profit, but still in need of trust.

No. But I trust that the Signal binaries for Android match the source code that is published on Github: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

I believe that’s only text. Try sending someone a video. Takes a while. Try forwarding that video to someone else moments later. Happens pretty quickly.

Same applies with photos.

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