What oh my god, you mean Facebook was violating my privacy? I never would have guessed. /s
This is why I stopped using any product associated with their company in 2018 and have never gone back.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
157 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
59358 readers
3846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Shocked I tell you. They were fingerprinting all along.
I think you might have misread the article (or maybe I have?). I think the article is saying that other people (a 3rd party that is not Meta) can use some metadata clues to puzzle out which OS a user is using WhatsApp from. The article then says this is bad because an attack can target specific OSes or tailor their attack to the user's OS. Eg. Hacker has an evil link that abuses an exploit on Android only. They can figure out who is signed into WhatsApp on android and only send those people the evil link.
I read it, I just believe that meta knew what they were doing. I also believe there are other fingerprints they are using while hiding behind the whisper protocol to say they are e2ee.
Oh it's really easy to fingerprint a device on Android so I'm 99% sure they are fingerprinting you in one way or another. But this seems to be an overly complicated way of doing it. It does really just seem like an unintentional design flaw.
If they fix it and randomise then I'd say you're right. But from the article they didn't say they would.
😱