whatsapp

[First published on September 05, 2016] I am ditching WhatsApp, following Facebook’s decision to begin harvesting data from its messaging service. Even though Motherboard claims “it may be possible to prevent WhatsApp to give your phone number to Facebook” (LOL) WhatsApp will still harvest your metadata. “Sharing metadata with Facebook still exposes users to significant risks,” says Claire Gartland, consumer protection counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Facebook will have data indicating who WhatsApp users communicate with and how frequently, and connecting WhatsApp users with their social media accounts and broader online activity, associations, political affiliations, and more....

China has largely blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of a big Communist Party gathering next month. The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company’s main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable....

The CIA didn’t break Signal or WhatsApp… despite what you’ve heard. The agency might be able to break into your phone, but files released today show no ability to intercept encrypted chats before they arrive there. There’s been one particularly misleading claim repeated throughout coverage of CIA documents released by WikiLeaks today: that the agency’s in-house hackers “bypassed” the encryption used by popular secure-chat software like Signal and WhatsApp. It doesn’t....