Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Can the government decrypt your WhatsApp chats? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by Fisch@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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For open source messengers, you can check whether they actually encrypt your messages and whether the server has access to your encryption keys but what about WhatsApp? Since it's not open source, you can't be sure that the encryption keys aren't sent to the server, right? Has there been a case where a government was able to access WhatsApp chats without reading them from the phone itself?

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[–] nao@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

It does not matter how good the encryption is. The app on your device has to be able to decrypt the content to be able to show it to you. If it has access to the decrypted data, it could just send it somewhere. If it has access to your private key, it can leak it. Even if the app is open source, you do not know if the binary on your phone matches that source, unless it uses reproducible builds and you actually verify the binary on your particular device, after each update.