cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free
encryptedmessaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they’re charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn’t come free and unlimited on most plans).It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There’s already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn’t because they simply don’t store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they’re encrypted by design.
no, their major point was offering free messaging in regions where people were being charged per SMS sent. end-to-end encryption has been introduced in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#End-to-end_encryption), seven years after it’s been founded and two years after Facebook acquisition.
Ops, my bad. I was under the impression the only reason WhatsApp is encrypted today is because they already were by the time FB bought them.
They paid US$ 20B to buy WhatsApp, and encryption is a major deterrent for them scanning all messages to enhance their targeted advertising business.
they have access to the metadata, which can be as valuable as the content of the messages.
Maybe you’re right, but I’d be hesitant to say WhatsApp user’s contacts list would be worth US$ 20B.
My theory is they bought WhatsApp just because it was organically growing to be the dominant messaging app, and Facebook didn’t want to lose this marked and bought them to squash the competition.
contact list? not really.
knowing who they talk to, how often, where from, for how long on average, and, in case of the countries where Whatsapp for Business is popular, what businesses do they spend money at? probably quite worth it.
The WhatsApp Business stuff is a more recent development. When FB bought them they had very little to work with.
I’d guess Whatsapp for Business stuff has been developed due to how many businesses have already been using Whatsapp. and even without it, when the same number is being listed on the business’ Facebook page, it’s pretty easy to connect the dots. I admit though, I used some shorthand when writing my previous comment. I meant “where Whatsapp is used to contact businesses”.
That said, the messages are stored locally on the device or in a cloud backup unless you disable that. If the device is unlocked, the messages are available to whoever has the device.
At this point we’re discussing the mother/daughter screen locking policy. It doesn’t matter what messaging app they use, if they rely solely on Face/Touch ID, the police may force then to unlock their phone anyway.