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.

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 :)

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I got a new job. whatsapp group (20 people) is migrating to signal because I don't use it. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

171 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I understand that it may be problematic sometimes but this was very smooth. I didn't even say anything.

A: what's your number for the whatsapp group Me: I don't have whatsapp because of facebook. B: ok, we have to use signal then A: ok

And that was it. Life can be very easy sometimes

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

WhatsApp doesn't let you send documents if you don't give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don't do anything but this is Facebook we're talking about.

The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can't even send a photo if you don't give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn't need just to send a single picture.

Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that's pretty low-priority but I'd still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it's worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams ("send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone" type bullshit mostly).

Revoking WhatsApp's contacts permission will not show peoples' nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn't block it outright when it's an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don't work in cyber security so it's clearly just incoherent rambing from me.