sure, but someone would find out if WhatsApp didn't e2ee their messages, which is the most important thing

Not necessarily. Code can be obfuscated.

Well you literally can be, because if it was not someone would find out instantly, it'd be a huge thing and meta would suffer greatly if they lied about e2ee

"Instantly", yeah, sure... WhatsApp isn't really used for secure communication (I wonder why), but by normies who don't know any better. I doubt most users would care if something like this came to light.

Sealed sender...., also signal is private, not anonymous, if you want both, simplex is ur friend

Sealed sender has nothing to do with this, as it applies to messages. You can still build a profile of users based on which users submit which hashes for contact discovery, without the need for them to send any message to those contacts at all.

well that's not the same situation the robber wouldn't see everything, the hw component would.... also other doors have the function of keeping heat inside, not keeping robbers aw

Not necessarily true, and also not really relevant to the analogy. If a hardware component would spy on basically everything, I'd find it weird to just say "Hey Intel, you already have all my data any way, so I'm just going to freely give it to Meta as well."

Well again if it did something like that, we would know thanks ro reverse engineering

You're putting too much blind trust in reverse engineering. And since you seem to be insistent on naively trusting Meta and proprietary applications, I won't try to convince you otherwise. Have fun, I guess.

yes you can verity that it is secure by reverse engineering, just like someone can read the code, someone can reverse engineer it.

No, you can't, at least not reliably. Reverse engineering is nowhere near as simple as "just like someone can read the code".

It DOESN'T, they literally state that they don't have encrypt metadata and can share it with other meta services

I don't keep up with whatever WhatsApp is doing, so nice to know that it's already worse than I thought, but it doesn't really change my point.

which honestly as long as the messages themselves are encrypted is sadly still a much better option than sms

If I could be certain that the messages are in fact encrypted as claimed, I'd agree.

thanks for proving you don't know, even the signal server doesn't know ur contacts...

They do, just not in the way you probably think. Unique identifiers (which phone numbers typically are) can always be used to track users, even if they're just stored as a hash value on a server. They don't immediately reveal the identity of a person like clear text phone numbers could do, but there's still information that can be extracted through metadata analysis. Though to be fair, this discussion is more relevant to anonymity than to privacy.

because it'd be above everything else and could see everything, no matter the sw ur using... so it'd be pointless anyways

Why would it be pointless? If some random person broke into your home, would you just open all the doors because apparently doors are pointless? Having one entity spy on you is a weird excuse to let another one do the same. I mean... you do you, but I think it's a weird mentality to have.

Just like with whatsapp...

Not really, as any unwanted traffic to WhatsApp's servers would just get drowned within wanted traffic, making it effectively unnoticeable to the user. The same can't be said for hardware that tries to connect somewhere despite no software on that device being allowed to connect to the internet.

Of course closed source software can be secure, but given that you can't verify that it actually is, it's better to treat it as if it's not. And I'm not saying that WhatsApp isn't encrypted, but we can't know if this also applies properly to metadata, or which encryption algorithm is actually used, if the keys are really only accessible to end users (i.e. if it's really E2EE), etc.

It's not unreasonable to think that Meta (or any other Big Tech company) makes their products just secure enough to not allow just about anyone with the right abilities to exploit weaknesses (which would obviously hurt their business), while still retaining the ability for themselves to have access to at least some of the data.

Also, how is it a good idea to give a signal my contacts if it's not okay to give meta my contacts?

Also, if you don't accept this argument, then how do you know there's not a component in your phone that listens to everything you say that's above system level?...

You seem to be treating privacy like an all-or-nothing situation. There's different levels to privacy, with different realistic possibilities and threat models. To give you the short answers to both questions: It's not a good idea to give Signal access to your contacts, and I indeed don't know if there's a component in my phone spying on everything. But there is nuance to both.

First off, Signal's Contact Dicovery Service is open source. Of course there's still a level of trust required regarding Signal's operational integrity, as we can't know if this is really what runs on their servers, but at least the Signal Foundation doesn't have a history of countless known privacy violations like Meta does, which means it all comes down to how much you trust either of those organisations. So even though I wouldn't recommend granting Signal access to your contacts and personally prefer messengers without such a feature (e.g. SimpleX), I also don't yet insist on recommending against it.

As for the hardware: Assuming that there is indeed some component spying on me, why would this be a justification to become careless about privacy on the software level? And the real difference between the arguments is the availability of alternatives. While there are quite a few open-source messenger alternatives, the same can't be said about hardware. And it's unlikely for there to be anything on the hardware level that could be spying without anyone noticing, at least if we assume that this hardware would send this data somewhere, which one would surely notice when analysing network traffic or by checking for emitted radio frequencies if the manufacturer had the genius idea of using mesh networks instead.
However, certain components could certainly be used as a backdoor for state actors if they gain physical access to a device, so I'm still advocating for open hardware and firmware.

It's not "fanboyism", I already wrote that SMS is horrible. And what makes you so sure that WhatsApp really is really properly encrypted and not doing some shenanigans? Proprietary apps can claim all kinds of things. So call me naive, but I'll take minimal non-sensitive unencrypted SMS through a somewhat trustworthy service provider over basically spyware on my phone any day, although that may of course be because I live somewhere with relatively decent data protection laws (not that one should put too much trust in those either, but eh, still better than trusting fucking Meta imho).

People install all kinds of crap on their phones, but a single more private messenger is suddenly too much to ask for? Some people really are beyond saving... Though I can kinda relate, my brother is just as stubborn. Any way, I'd still advise to just quit WA and tell them you'll only communicate through Signal (or SimpleX, Session, etc.) in the future, which should help as an incentive. If you're willing to do that is of course up to yo

EVERYONE IN MY COUNTRY USES WHATSAPP, YOU CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT WA HERE YK...

Same thing probably could have been said about my country (Germany) 10 years ago, and look where we're at now.

I spontaneously deleted my WhatsApp account a few years ago and haven't regretted it once. When people suddenly can't contact you through WhatsApp anymore, they can still use SMS (which is horrible as well but still better than any services by Meta) or hopefully give in at some point and also use Signal.

Also, do those friends of yours know that you don't have to immediately abandon WhatsApp to use Signal? Both can be used simultaneously, like many of my family and relatives do, and I see almost no logical reason to refuse that.

Kids are allowed on public transport, you know? For groceries, just use a backpack or a shopping caddy. And how often do you haul furniture that you absolutely need a car for that? Just take a rental car for the rare occasion, which also allows you to rent a much more fitting vehicle for the job, like a van for example.

The choice between wrongfully being called antisemitic and actually supporting a genocide is not a difficult one. Saying this as a German.

Agreed, but I also don't think that it's wrong to directly quote someone. It doesn't necessarily reflect the author's opinion on the matter or make them "disgusting".

That's a quote from another commenter in this thread, not from the AJ article. So how is this relevant?

How so? AJ is just quoting CENTCOM here.

To quote from the article itself:

The number of young men applying to be conscientious objectors and refuse armed military service in Germany has risen sharply this year, undermining a drive by Berlin to create Europe’s strongest conventional army and deter the Russian threat.

And the "Russian threat" simply isn't really there (at least not to NATO), so it's just a lame excuse for militarisation. This is not even a tankie opinion.

The Bundeswehr isn't really directly involved with the occupying forces in Palestine, so this has nothing do with it.

Minor correction: RT actually stands for "Russia Today"