Hacker News Reader

Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

"The privacy and security of your personal chats with family and friends will never change.

Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see the content you share with family and friends, which includes your personal messages and calls, the attachments you share, or the location you send. We do not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling, and WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook."

Does this mean that Whatsapp will not share invasive data with Facebook? I think not.

Does it mean that they are able to run whatever profilers they like over the data and then share the output of that? I think so. They wouldn't be sharing the content per say, just the evaluation of the data. I would also suspect that shared profiling would have been going on from asap from the day they bought whatsapp.

View on HN

My interpretation is that they can't do that (if what they say is true). They specifically say that they cannot see the content. This would seem to preclude profiling/summarising the data, because the profiler would have to see the data in the first place.

However, note the differing wording they use: 'WhatsApp cannot see your personal messages or hear your calls' vs 'WhatsApp does not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling'. So, are they saying that they do keep logs of who some people are messaging/calling? Maybe they don't log Zuckerberg's usage, but keep everyone else's, and that lets them get away with the weasel words?

Also, what about video calls? They don't mention those, presumably they aren't encrypted and transit through FB/WA servers, allowing them to be viewed/recorded if desired.

Fair enough - these statements are very open to interpretation.

The way I view them is to try to take an approach that a lawyer would. Could a lawyer try to argue that they process the data and generate an artifact that is passed to facebook, and that is fine because they are not passing the content? I think a lawyer could and would fancy their chances. And anyway, who's going to take them to court?

Do you recollect all the kerfuffle about the NSA collecting meta-data not the actual content? I think what I'm suggesting is akin to that already existent process.

> 'WhatsApp cannot see your personal messages or hear your calls' vs 'WhatsApp does not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling'.

This is definitely suspicious because it is so awkward. You would never say that sentence in that way. It could have easily been "WhatsApp does not keep logs of who you are messaging or calling" and that would have flowed much better.

> Also, what about video calls?

They have stated earlier that video calls are end-to-end encrypted in a similar way to voice and chat.

its two separate sentences:

> Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see the content you share with family and friends, which includes your personal messages and calls, the attachments you share, or the location you send.

They cannot see _what_ you send. But obviously they could still see who you send messages to.

> We do not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling, and WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook."

Which means that they cannot keep aggregate logs of call data, this is to align with the next bits of GDPR. However it doesn't preclude monitoring individuals, as that is a legal requirement.

the rough translation is: we cannot keep logs of who called whom, unless we are asked to by governments. The irony is, that if whatsapp were charging for usage, they would actually be able to store and use the aggregate call data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com