I never expected that they'd put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
It's one of those things that everyone will be crazy about for a week and then... poof, it will just become irrelevant, because it doesn't really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
Maybe it's Zucc's way to get us acquainted with treating bots like humans, so one day he can finally come out as a robot and be accepted by the wider society
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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I never expected that they'd put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
it doesn't really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): "Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world."
What a cringe :(
Hmm, that makes a little bit more sense, but yes, still cringe corporate move trying to monetize on the AI craze
I'm not sure the robots want him, either.
Unnecessary feature bloat, that's what it is.
It's not about what people want, it's about what them want people to use.
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Why would you use WhatsApp in the first place?
It is basically the default in most latam countries.
Many Asia countries too, probably Europe too.
Africa and the middle east as well
If you meet someone new they may essentially force you to (through lack of other options), if you wish to communicate with them
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Many countries like the UK charge 35p for an MMS. So to send pictures to anyone you needed an internet connected messenger.
SMS/MMS effectively died here.
So if I want to communicate everyone uses WhatsApp or iMessage
And most importantly, SMS is not secure [1].
I love proton but I'd rather use SMS every damn day than WhatsApp
It doesn't matter what you or I want if people are on WhatsApp, and you want to talk to them, you have to use it.
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Because the rest of the world is not stuck to iMessage/SMS? We all adopted a messenger app back around 2010-12, that continues to work across all smartphones, computers and some feature phones, that has actual E2EE for one-to-one chats, even if the metadata now goes to Facebook instead of Apple.
This is why proprietary messaging solutions are bad for both freedom and privacy. You are stuck with antifeatures and you have no way of truely verifying privacy
End-to-end encryption is the best possible safeguard against Meta snooping on your data.
This has always been my biggest pet peeve with WhatsApp. Yes, they might encrypt it all and the encryption might be practically unbreakable, but what worries me is what Meta might do with the private encryption keys. Lem me elaborate further.
I'll start by trying to explain how key-based encryption, the type of encryption WhatsApp uses, work at their core, for those who don't know (THIS IS GOING TO BE AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION). Imagine you want a friend to send you a message with super sensitive contents. Here's what you do to guarantee that no one else can read it but you:
- First, you generate two keys, which are pretty much two really big numbers. One will be called the public key and the other one will be the private key.
- Then, you go to the person who wants to send you stuff and say "Hey John, remember that really important message you wanted to send me? Take my public key and make sure you cypher your message using it".
- Once you receive the message, you decypher it using the private key. Using the private key is the only way you can read this message. You can't use the public key for it because it won't work.
This means that, if someone else manages to get the encrypted message, they will need the private key to read what it says, but they don't have it, only you have it. The only thing they can do keep guessing what that key is until they find what it was and read the message, but that can take up to millions of years, even using supercomputers.
As you can see, this works really well for sending messages without anyone but the sender and the reciever knowing what is being said, and that's why it's so used in encrypted message apps...
...but what if Meta has access to the private keys? I mean, what if, after WhatsApp creating the public and private keys for messaging, the private key is retrieved and stored in Meta's servers, making them able to read all the messages you receive?
Can someone with more experience in the subject say if my concerns are valid?
I have never believed Facebook when they’ve said they don’t have the ability to see your messages. There’s no proof of that whatsoever. And it’s fucking FACEBOOK.
I would be SHOCKED if they didn’t have access to private keys.
I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain... maybe it's not
What I'd be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be "Oh, this person texts their mum every morning", but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be "accused" of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that's besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.
In the end none of us have anything to hide... until we suddenly do
I know this wasn't argued here, but I'd like to make it clear anyways: You don't have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don't want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.
I share that concern and would not rely on my messaging being secure. Anyways as far as they state it themself, your private key for decrypting should stay on your device (in fact it uses the signal protocol and does a few more steps, e.g. to implement shared sessions over multiple devices. You can have a look at their FAQ, they've linked a white paper within it describing the technical details). But the main question is in my opinion: do you trust the guarantees they give you? It's the same struggle as with any proprietary software. You can trust them or you don't, but you will never know without access to the source code.
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I'm just gonna say, end to end encryption is jack shit when they can just access the content at the source, analyze it with local rules and call sending to meta how often you talk about a certain topic and with whom telemetry
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But AI generated stickers!
Easy, don't use Zuckerbot crap
Not easy when all my friends and family use it
And in other parts of the world where it's just a standard. I was surprised when I saw WhatsApp numbers on advertisements with the WhatsApp logo. Hard not to be on WhatsApp in those places.
Also my friends and Family, but this is why I don't use this shit, I can also communicate with them, better still, with a simple call, perhaps with an SMS (yes, it still exists) or directly in person, accompanied with some beers.
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