Privacy

31854 readers

160 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

104

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

submitted 1 year ago by Fisch@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SheDiceToday@eslemmy.es 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And the metadata is enough to get convictions. A person was convicted back in 2019 or so based on the metadata of her whatsapp conversation with a reporter. Natalie something, I think.

[–] cjf@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

It wouldn’t surprise me if WhatsApp’s model on this is what the UK government were thinking of with the Online Safety Bill when they tried to enforce a back door in encrypted messengers.

It’s incredible just how much more interesting metadata can be than the actual message contents.

Explaining this to people when they ask why I don’t use WhatsApp is pretty difficult though.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I found out that what I thought was just a casual walk down the street mindlessly chatting with a friend turned out to also involve a third party neither of us were aware of tracking all of our movements.