Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

They've also largely made WhatsApp worse.


How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.

I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.


From an infrastructure PoV, I seem to recall that WhatsApp was one of the few major companies that used Erlang, and were famous for being able to run the entirety of WhatsApp on only a few servers, each of which was serving millions of concurrent connections, mostly thanks to Erlang/BEAM (at least, from what I read). When it got acquired by Facebook, they then proceeded to rewrite the entirety of the backend in C++. Seems kind of baffling to me.


They added ads, an "AI companion", and backdoor logging of all chat messages


That last one’s going to need some substantiation.

“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)


I believe it was the automatic unencrypted weekly data upload to Google Drive


Can you post a link?


No. It's a special arrangement between Google and WhatsApp which makes a file only visible to WhatsApp, and not appear in your regular drive so you can't do normal cloud file operations like generating public links.


It's not a "Special Arrangement", it's a feature in Google Drive when an app does a backup rather than "upload".


Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.


How's this? Not sure if it's the same issue but it's much more damning than the one I knew about. https://www.techspot.com/news/112232-federal-agent-whatsapp-...

You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.


> You know how I found this link? Googling WhatsApp encryption backdoor. You could have too.

No need for the attitude. Op asked you for a source, which is customary for one to back up their initial claim; an onus on you and not for someone else to validate your claims.


All I asked for was specific examples while acknowledging what I hated about the platforms progression.


I'm not sure why you're replying to me, my comment was for the person I replied to and whom I quoted (inigyou)


My guess is that this person is using multiple HN accounts and is getting them mixed up.


Had a similar thought, very messy conversation.


Nope, just got confused who was replying to who in this thread while loading site from mobile.


Reconning. We made it so Zuck had plausible deniability for all the bad shit happening on WA as a direct result of anticipated regulatory pressure.

There is no “make things harder for the dictator” at Meta/Fb and never has been.


WhatsApp encryption is Signal


Yes


Not yet they haven't. They've basically left it alone, with very minor UI/UX improvements.

They have very recently shown signs of making it worse (the AI button), but overall I've been surprised how careful they've been about doing it slowly. We've probably got another 5-10 years of it being great before they turn it to shit.


Yeah, I'll admit they've basically left it alone, but I'd chalk up the changes as minor UI/UX regressions that have ballooned the app size by an order of magnitude since it was acquired.

And the native Windows app was a post-Facebook introduction, but it was also Facebook that canned it in favour of the current web wrapper turd.


And by "UX improvements" we mean dropping support for millions of devices




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: