(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
 

whatsapp – dropsafe

2021-11 

I'll be blunt: I love @propublica, they have some great people, do some great reporting, they have an Onion Site even…

But this article by them is egregious, insinuating clickbait which harms the cause of end-to-end encryption, and it even admits it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-for-its-2-billion-whatsapp-users

The gist is:

"Facebook promises that Nobody Else Can Read Conversation Messages! But if a Participant forwards the message to the WhatsApp Abuse Team, that's not true!"

That's all. And it's bullshit. People can forward messages to anyone, and it can still be E2E encrypted.

. @propublica dress it up, of course, with references to "Special Facebook Software" and "Artificial Intelligence" – which, yeah, when you have 2.5 billion people, some fraction of whom are submitting abuse reports, you need tools to triage and cut down on noise:

But the article is actively harmful in several ways:

1/ it conflates "abuse reporting" with "content moderation"

2/ it besmirches the WhatsApp brand name and insinuates that WhatsApp by this mechanism is not delivering end-to-end encryption:

3/ it attempts to delegitimise analysis of unencrypted metadata – e.g. patterns of behaviour, or group chatnames which mention (say) "white supremacy" keywords – in order to combat spam and other forms of abuse:

aside: this is something which I already covered at length in a blogpost:

4/ And (for the moment, finally) it attempts to brand "forwarding copies of abusive messages to safety authorities" as somehow being a breach of end-to-end encryption.

This is a BAD THING TO DO. WE NEED MORE OF THIS.

*Bad Hot Takes* like this article are exactly why I am drafting a formal test – hopefully soon to be an Internet "RFC" -for end-to-end encrypted and secure messaging – and I've already got this covered:

https://github.com/alecmuffett/draft-muffett-end-to-end-secure-messaging

We DO NOT BENEFIT when a bunch of journalists who are pissed at Mark Zuckerberg stomp in and unilaterally try to redefine end-to-end encryption.

Most especially: when they attempt to burn the only reasonable at-scale E2E-respecting approach to user safety.

I am saddened by this. The ProPublica article is a bad hot take. Shame on @propublica, @peterelkind, @jackgillum, @CraigSilverman and others.

tl;dr — "The ability to forward a message does not negate end-to-end encryption."

This Is Not Good Micheal Aloni GIF

For more: Check out the latest Twitter discussion on:

Propublica Think That Whatsapp Abuse Reports Are A Backdoor

— with a #ReadyMadeTwitterSearch at:

https://github.com/alecmuffett/ready-made-twitter-searches#propublica-think-that-whatsapp-abuse-reports-are-a-backdoor

Originally tweeted by Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) on 2021/09/07.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/whatsapp
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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