this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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For all of those saying Facebook was just complying with the law- there is absolutely no reason for Facebook to have access to its users' private information. The company I work for can't do anything with a customer's account unless they give us the password. We can't see anything they have saved there. All of the private stuff they have is private and even if a court ordered us to show it to them, we literally couldn't comply.
We're a small company and we can do it. A company the size of Meta can certainly do it.
Can't you just look at the data in. The database though? No need to login as the user. Surely not every field is hashed
Hashing is not reversible so obviously it is not hashed. You hash data you want to compare later to see if it is still the same. For example you may hash user passwords you store in your database. So you don’t know the actual password, but can confirm later that the same password is still being used. You know or can infer someone is storing your passwords in plaintext when they have a maximum length as that indicates they are not correctly hashing.
It is however possible and even easy in many databases to do row or document level encryption. Many privacy first applications do client side keys and encryption so the database does in fact have no plain text in it.
That's a good point and I don't know the answer to that (my guess is encryption is involved), but as other people have pointed out, Facebook has an alternate encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, so Facebook is clearly capable of not being able to access its users' messages.
Yeah, based on Signal's protocol. Signal is the only messaging app I use.
Wasn't there strong evidence Facebook has a built-in backdoor to their encryption?
You are the product. Are you paying money for the service? No? Zero expectation of privacy.
We enable them to make profit via ads and data harvesting. Private texts/DMs do not need to be involved in that.
Don't use them. I haven't had an account for over a decade.
To be fair, I'd imagine there's a wealth of data to plug into their AI models from private chats.
I'd imagine it's hard for them to resist the temptation
You can do it because you're a small company. Get enough attention, and the FBI will force you to decrypt on demand. They've done it before and the supreme court backed them up. Do it over seas and expect your US traffic to get blocked, if they don't raid your offices.
That is untrue. The FBI tried to get Apple to decrypt a shooter's iPhone in Florida a few years back and they wouldn't budge.
This isn’t quite right…
Apple didn’t have the means to decrypt the information, but it was within their ability to do (by writing code to do so.)
But asking a company for the unencrypted data, and forcing a company to produce a new application, are completely different things.
Happen to have a source for that? That's nigh impossible for most encryption
E2EE is what prevents this, which is why the TLAs hate it and legislators are trying to prohibit it.
WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram don't have that issue.
Signal yes, WhatsApp yes but not the meta data, telegram only if explicitly set to encrypted otherwise no.
Because they have a back door due to cloud storage.