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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

> "On the first point, Marcus said that Facebook is enforcing a strict separation between users’ social data—their Facebook likes, photos, etc—and the financial data that will be available on Libra’s network. There will not, he insisted, be a readily available data trove connecting users’ transactional data to their Facebook profiles, and users’ funds themselves will be cryptographically secured. “We don’t want financial data and social data to be commingled,” he explained."

WhatsApp showed that eventually, the data is likely to be merged.

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> We don’t want financial data and social data to be commingled

"Want" can change with one board meeting. And if they start "wanting" it in 3 years, is there a guarantee it won't happen?

>“We don’t want financial data and social data to be commingled”

Keyword is want. They don't want the data to be commingled, but alas, it will.

Was it the data that was merged with WhatsApp, or was it the infrastructure? AFAICT, FB can't connect what I said on whatsapp to what I say on Messenger because everything is e2e encrypted. They have metadata (would need it to route the messages, and for providing the service).

What am I missing?

Don't brush off metadata as useless information. They know who you talk to when you send these WhatsApp messages. They know how often you talk to these people. They know when you talk to these people. From this information they are more able to glean who are the important people in your life, what kind of relationship you have,and can then weight these profiles better. Only talk to this person sporadically during normal business hours? Good chance this person is purely a work contact. Routinely send messages after work? Probably a friend. Send lots of large payload messages late at night to a certain someone? Naughty you ;)

Of course this is endemic to any third party you trust buffering and delivering these communications, this is not particular to Facebook. However, Facebook is explicitly using this information, while others explicitly say they don't.

Mainly, they said they would not connect your phone number to your FB account, but then the did.

Furthermore, metadata is super critical already. Don’t forget that WhatsApp has your location data as well (if you enable it, what most people probably do to share their location with friends occasionally).

Although I have no proof, knowing FB, I bet they extract meta data from all of your photos and send them back. I mean, why not? Maybe not all the time, or maybe not in every version, but given FB‘s track history of giving zero fucks and trying everything under the sun to gather more data, it wouldn’t surprise me (same is obviously true for Instagram).

I try to use WhatsApp less and less and I removed all permissions except contacts. If I want to send a photo, I use the Share capability of iOS and select from Photos to share with WhatsApp. The insane part is: this behavior is not doable in Android. You either grant photo access or you can’t send anything.

> If I want to send a photo, I use the Share capability of iOS and select from Photos to share with WhatsApp

is FB Inc separated from photo metadata that way ?

From access to your photo library – yes, I'd think so. I don't know if they extract meta data from the photo you're about to send via WhatsApp. But this is a different thing than accessing meta data of thousands of photos.

They've already asserted that FB data will be used to verify your identity for Libra. Sounds contradictory.

I fail to see how a social media profile can be used to verify financial identity for shit.

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