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Comment by rwaksmunski | Hacker News Reader

Dark patterns trick WhatsApp users to enable backups to Google and Apple. If you have them disabled odds are good the other side got tricked into them. Even if your backups are encrypted, it's using only a 64bit key. That means Five Eyes have near real-time access to your "encrypted" messages. Hell, I have to decline backups every time I use WhatsApp on my iPhone, yet after a phone reset all my messages were still there. They were gone in Signal for example. Is UK making a stink about it to lure bad people into a false sense of security? We all know why large US tech companies bought Skype (twice) back in the day. It's naive to think WhatsApp was bought for a different purpose.

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> It's naive to think WhatsApp was bought for a different purpose.

Sorry, is it naive to think that Facebook bought WhatsApp for its userbase and technology?

> Sorry, is it naive to think that Facebook bought WhatsApp for its userbase and technology?

Well, no. Absolutely not. Until you notice the 20B pricetag. I'm not seeing 20B worth of ads on WhatsApp, are you?

From my limited understanding of WhatsApp revenues were healthy prior to the buyout. I have seen some revenue estimates since the buyout that could justify the sale price, should they be accurate.

Who was paying them?

WhatsApp stopped charging users, and doesn't run ads. It has no revenue.

Whatsapp has a Business accounts feature that has some pricing built in https://business.whatsapp.com/

WhatsApp doesn't rely on ads for their income and never has. For one the technology may have helped the company save development cost for their other chat applications (Facebook messenger & Instagram). On the other hand WhatsApp Business is probably pretty profitable, although there are sadly no public revenue reports I could find. Additionally I assume the running costs for WhatsApp are probably not very high.

Are you factoring in opportunity cost? Could an independent Whatsapp have cost Facebook >= $20B worth of revenue? Could Whatsapp have evolved into a more fully-fledged Social Network to rival Facebook? Ensuring the answer is "no" for Facebook is worth a lot more than $20B in my book.

I don't really believe WhatsApp was bought to show ads on WhatsApp, I believe it was bought to forestall competition and protect Facebook's existing revenue. Zuckerberg was afraid that users would leave Facebook for WhatsApp, and tried to prevent that by buying it and merging it in to messenger.

They largely failed though, as for political (and maybe also technical) reasons the merge was cancelled.

If the other party has a back up, my messages will be visible as well or just his?

Your messages to him will be backed up and stored in plain text by default along with all of his messages and all the messages to him from other users. If that makes any sense. I would not be surprised if 90%+ of WhatsApp messages are just sitting at Google and Apple unencrypted.

The backups were indeed WhatsApp's Achilles heel. However recently they've finally given users the option to store the key on their side and only there.

Source for 64-bit key part? Seems unreasonably low.

It's false. The OP is probably confusing it for the option of encrypting the backup with a 64-digit key (which is ~212 bits)

Which, depending on the type of encryption, is still too low.

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