Interoperability is a weird one though. Imagine WhatsApp can connect to Signal, and people use this feature. What would then be the point of using Signal, if WhatsApp gets the data after all?

(Signal has already announced not wanting to support this, I just used it as an example)

[–] iamak@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True. However there are certain advantages

WhatsApp gets only a part of your data (coz many people might be on different apps)
You don't have to run WhatsApp on your device so they can't collect that data either

I know it's not perfect but better than the current scenario and a step in the right direction

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since WhatsApp is proprietary, we don't know if the users are the only ones who can decrypt their messages. I'll always have to assume Meta can read everything, which is the most sensible data they could possibly collect.

So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it.

[–] iamak@infosec.pub 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. I don't endorse WhatsApp. What I meant is if you chat with 15 people out of which 5 use WhatsApp, only those 5 chats are potentially readable by Meta. Because those are the only chats which will get sent to Meta servers.

So you have the benefit that the other 10 chats are not readable by Meta.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, true. And concerning your name and phone number, they probably already have that too, one way or another.

[–] iamak@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

At this point I just assume Meta, Google and Apple have my number due to people storing the number on their devices. Amazon also might have it because people might have paid me via Amazon Pay (and given it access to contacts).

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