WhatsApp hack: Company urges 1.5 billion users to update app over security fears. The Hague District Court’s WhatsApp Decision Creates Concerns for Mobile App Developers. How to Change Your WhatsApp Settings Before Facebook Data Sharing Begins. WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook for ad targeting — here’s how to opt out. Facebook-owned messaging giant WhatsApp has announced a big change to its privacy policy which, once a user accepts its new T&Cs, will see it start to share some user data with its parent company — including for ad-targeting purposes on the latter service.
“[B]y coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp,” WhatsApp writes in a blog on the change today. “Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of.” WhatsApp will also be sharing the data with the “Facebook family of companies” — so presumably its user data could also be fed to VR firm Oculus Rift, another Fb acquisition, and photo-sharing network Instagram. WhatsApp’s privacy U-turn on sharing data with Facebook draws more heat in Europe. A dramatic privacy about-face by messaging app WhatsApp this summer, in which it revealed an update to its T&Cs would for the first time allow the sharing of its user data with parent company Facebook, is getting the pair into hot water in Europe.
This week Facebook was ordered to stop harvesting data on WhatsApp users in Germany by the Hamburg city DPA, which hit out at the controversial change to WhatsApp’s T&Cs as both misleading to users and a breach of national data protection law. (Facebook disagrees, and is appealing the order in Germany.) It now looks the UK’s national data protection watchdog, the ICO, is preparing to ramp up its action too. The ICO had already been — in its words — “considering” the deal, questioning whether the two companies were being transparent with users about how their data is being shared and used. There’s a lot of anger out there. “There’s a lot of anger out there. “It’s an active and important investigation,” Denham added, during the PM interview. WhatsApp and Facebook data sharing: How to opt out of controversial new terms.
1/43 Designed by Pierpaolo Lazzarini from Italian company Jet Capsule.
The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. Forbes Welcome. Forget Apple vs. the FBI: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People. For most of the past six weeks, the biggest story out of Silicon Valley was Apple’s battle with the FBI over a federal order to unlock the iPhone of a mass shooter.
The company’s refusal touched off a searing debate over privacy and security in the digital age. But this morning, at a small office in Mountain View, California, three guys made the scope of that enormous debate look kinda small. Mountain View is home to WhatsApp, an online messaging service now owned by tech giant Facebook, that has grown into one of the world’s most important applications. More than a billion people trade messages, make phone calls, send photos, and swap videos using the service. This means that only Facebook itself runs a larger self-contained communications network. Don’t let WhatsApp nudge you into sharing your data with Facebook.
When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons.
The first was that it seemed beautifully designed from the outset: it was clean, minimalist and efficient; and, secondly, it had a business model that did not depend on advertising. Instead, users got a year free, after which they paid a modest annual subscription. Better still, the co-founder Jan Koum, seemed to have a very healthy aversion to the surveillance capitalism that underpins the vast revenues of Google, Facebook and co, in which they extract users’ personal data without paying for it, and then refine and sell it to advertisers.
In a blog post headed “Why We Don’t Sell Ads” written in June 2012, for example, Koum quoted approvingly a memorable line uttered by Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) in the movie Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” Now we know. WhatsApp vulnerability allows snooping on encrypted messages. A security vulnerability that can be used to allow Facebook and others to intercept and read encrypted messages has been found within its WhatsApp messaging service.
Facebook claims that no one can intercept WhatsApp messages, not even the company and its staff, ensuring privacy for its billion-plus users. Google Launches Key Transparency While A Trade-Off in WhatsApp is Called a Backdoor. The Guardian ran a sensational story on Friday claiming a backdoor was discovered in WhatsApp, enabling intelligence agencies to snoop on encrypted messages.
Gizmodo followed up saying it's no backdoor at all, but reasonable, intended behavior. So what's really going on here? The lost phone, lost message dilemma The issue at question is WhatsApp's answer to the question of what applications should do when someone's phone number changes (or they reinstall their app, or switch phones). Suppose Alice sends a message to Bob encrypted with Bob's key K1. Unfortunately, Bob just dropped his phone in a lake. Fail safe: The server can delete the queued message, since it was encrypted with K1, which no longer exists.
Note that the second behavior makes the service seem more reliable: it's one less way a message can fail to be delivered. The issue here is that the second behavior opens a security hole: Bob need not have actually lost his phone for the server to act as if he has lost it. Dozens of cryptographers call on Guardian to retract WhatsApp 'backdoor' article - Cyberscoop. A growing list of prominent cryptographers and cybersecurity researchers published an open letter asking the Guardian to retract an article it published last week asserting that WhatsApp had a backdoor, making it unsafe to use.
The Guardian argued that design decisions by WhatsApp made to increase reliability for users meant that governments could potentially force the company to hand over messages. The decision was a deliberate one by WhatsApp’s designers and the issue has been known for months. BurgessCT WhatsApp and it's backdoor peering into you ~ BurgessCT. Updated 14 January 2017 ----------------------- Today the Guardian reported that the Facebook owned application, WhatsApp contains a backdoor into its cryptographic end-to-end protocol.
What this means, if true, is that your private conversations, may be encrypted as they pass through the internet, but not within the Facebook infrastructure. When I saw Guardian’s tweet on the topic, I immediately requested they dig deeper. It is important to understand the difference between poor security implementation and willful placement of a backdoor into the encryption code is significant. The former is easily correctable with a code adjustment or rewrite. Recommendation: 1 Do not use WhatsApp for any conversations requiring the utmost privacy and security. 2 Set up an alert on the search engine of your choice on “WhatsApp” so as to monitor the resolution of this backdoor and identification of any future vulnerabilities.