Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Can the government decrypt your WhatsApp chats? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For open source messengers, you can check whether they actually encrypt your messages and whether the server has access to your encryption keys but what about WhatsApp? Since it's not open source, you can't be sure that the encryption keys aren't sent to the server, right? Has there been a case where a government was able to access WhatsApp chats without reading them from the phone itself?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

It’s not illegal because it is end to end encrypted when you send messages, but it’s not encrypted on your phone and they have access to that, not to mention, I imagine they have access to the keys used to encrypt the messages, so even if they backed it up encrypted they can still read the messages.

The point of implementing it is not to protect people from surveillance, but rather to make people think they’re protected so they’ll keep using the platform rather than moving to another service. Their actual claims about it amount to “If your on public Wi-Fi or something, people skimming that won’t be able to see your messages” which is absurd because they already couldn’t.

Admittedly, no law enforcement that they refuse to cooperate with will have access to the messages, but like, “law enforcement groups Facebook doesn’t cooperate with” is a very small list.