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

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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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[–] loutr@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

Ever noticed how those notifications include the message content and the sender? Google has access to this information, despite the encryption.

Not necessarily. I work on a messaging app, and we only use firebase to "wake up" the app. Initially the notification doesn't display anything meaningful, but the app very quickly connects to the server (tells the app who it should connect with) and then the peer (to finally get the actual content). The notification is updated once we have the content. But it typically goes so fast that you only ever see the final version of the notification.