U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps

21

I thought Whats App was encrypted and could not be read even by Meta - or am I being unbelievably naïve!

22

I’m not sure if it’s on by default, but mine has been encrypted for many years now

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23

AFAIK WhatsApp has been end to end encrypted for a long time. Obviously Meta knows who your contacts are and where and when you contact them, which can be a concern or not for you.

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24

Yes the contents are encrypted, but Meta collects a ton of metadata from Whatsapp which is far more valuable to them.

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25

That would never work for me. My kids will just keep on texting me with messages.

26

I’ve never used a messaging app other than Apple Messages. If I am understanding this correctly, using an encrypted app such as Signal requires that the users on both ends must use the same app. Also, from reading the NBC article, it looks like the only thing that the hackers would get from me is metadata, and I don’t think that would be useful to them or harmful to me, practically speaking.

27

AFAIK, yes. Even though other messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Google Messages, also use the Signal protocol to secure their applications.

The current problem is Apple Messages uses SMS when we text an Android user. SMS is a plain text message that can be captured by a packet sniffer. And may be stored for hours, weeks or years by our cellular carriers. It’s not just metadata, it’s the entire message.

As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said "metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

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