What's your best guess at how whatsapp manages to generate AI summaries of your private messages without ever reading the private messages?

Just a moment...

(www.pcmag.com)

Even a cursory attempt at defending these companies is a bad joke.

First, if I were to take a guess I would assume that it can be coded to give the AI read/write access to messages because it’s part of the encryption protocol without giving it to Meta as a company? I really have no idea because I don’t write code or deal with backend stuff so it’s just an idea.

Second, I’m not defending the tech company. I’m coming up with a hypothesis as to why something may be possible. I’m not saying it’s probable.l because we both know that Meta will find any way to gain access to data by doing any sort of shady shit they can.

tbh, that's probably better than Telegram. I get so many random messages on Telegram. It's so annoying.

That’s not really how encryption works. If their chat bot can read/parse the message, then it has the keys, which means meta would have the keys. This doesn’t mean they absolutely are reading your messages, but it does seem to mean it would be possible.

The concept of "End to End Encryption" (E2EE) is that one end encrypts the data, it passes through transport, and the only person who can read the decrypted data is the intended receiver.

In the case of WhatsApp, this should mean:

• Your phone (WhatsApp app) encrypts a message
• Your phone sends the encrypted ("unreadable") message to Facebook
• Facebook sends the message to the intended receiver
• The receiver decrypts the message

The whole "Meta AI summaries" thing has to run on their servers. Large language models small enough to fit on a phone don't produce sensible output yet, and your phones battery would drain very quickly. Since each message is (supposed to be) encrypted with different keys, no human nor computer can make sense of the encrypted data without the keys to decrypt it. For their servers to provide a "summary of your chats", they have to be able to read the content of the messages. Thus proving that the whole "end to end encryption" in WhatsApp is either false, or made entirely useless with them sending all messages to themselves without E2EE.

The only proof that would invalidate this is evidence of the LLM running locally on device. Even then, the way some of WhatsApp's services work (like notifications, WhatsApp Web) creates some serious doubt on the "E2EE" claim.

It is absolutely essential that any communications platform claiming "E2EE" proves this by making the client-side code (the stuff running on your device) fully open source. A proprietary app, like WhatsApp, by definition makes it harder to fully understand its inner workings, and thus fully verify the E2EE claim.

Thank you for that explanation!

So, this is probably dumb but could their whole argument be that it’s E2EE from your phone to their server, which unpacks it and reads it, then repackages it and E2EE from the server to the recipient while the AI sends the summary back to you E2EE from the server?

It’s so stupid, but I could see their marketing saying that it’s technically E2EE just with a…detour (e.g., we don’t say the whole process was E2EE in one trip).

Once again, I’m not sticking up for them. I am just trying to wrap my head around how they could justify this shit at all.

There is no justification. The "Ends" in E2EE mean the initial sender, and intended recipient. The "transport" should have zero insight into the content. Encrypting a message to the servers is standard even for "non-private" messaging services, it's usually done with SSL (part of HTTPS).

Lets compare it to traditional mail. If you send something, the postal company can always just open your mail and read it. With computers, we have black magic (E2EE) that physically prevents the postal company from doing that. In this hypothetical, Facebook (owner of WhatsApp) is the company that provides you with the pen and paper (the app), and is a postal company (their servers). They promise that the black magic on the paper prevents them from reading what you wrote, but then they clearly read the content of your letter to send you a summary of the conversation.

Mid-message quick edit: They could've also done something to the pen (other parts of the app) to have it tell them what you wrote. This would mean the black magic (E2EE) is applied, but is completely useless. (End of edit)

If the process for making the pen and paper (the app) was publicly known (open source), you could make your own, and be sure the black magic (E2EE) is applied properly. That way you can be certain the postal company (servers) can't read your letter, only the recipient can.

If the postal company gives you the pen and paper without telling you how to make it, it's nearly impossible to tell if the black magic was applied properly.

I found technical details of the private processing in this whitepaper: https://ai.meta.com/static-resource/private-processing-technical-whitepaper

It's an opt-in feature. In settings, users will be required to enable Private Processing, which Meta describes as an "optional capability that enables users to initiate a request to a confidential and secure environment and use AI for processing messages where no one—including Meta and WhatsApp—can access them."

That's how.

That's what the report button is for.

It's an opt-in feature. In settings, users will be required to enable Private Processing, which Meta describes as an "optional capability that enables users to initiate a request to a confidential and secure environment and use AI for processing messages where no one—including Meta and WhatsApp—can access them."

You should have read your link before typing all this. Their E2EE is a bit similar to OMEMO and Signal in the sense that one device is really like one contact, and one chat between two people is really like a group chat with many members associated with two identities. So they are adding another optional endpoint where you send the message to get that summary.

Of course if you do send it, it's readable by them no matter what they say.

Of course proprietary encryption (I'd argue that even proprietary code) can't be trusted to do what declared.

But there is no logical contradiction whatsoever between their claim of having E2EE and this functionality.

No it doesn't have to, their article says if you enable it, the messages are resent someplace. Of course those that are have to be read by whatever summarizes them, so are not secured from Meta.

Honestly for systems operating on sequences of tokens, like those "AI"'s, I wonder if it's possible to divide their functionality so that it would be a zero-knowledge system with the side providing computation not being able to decipher them.

In the dumbest sense, if some operation can be reduced to multiplication of two numbers, or modulo 2 addition, or whatever, and those two numbers encrypted and combined thus result in something predictably decrypted by someone having encrypted the original numbers, then you can offload the hard operation to a remote service and not worry about them learning what the numbers really were. There are probably articles and whitepapers describing how to do exactly this, fundamental science is usually beyond what's been done practically.

I wish they'd delete my WhatsApp account. I got rid of WhatsApp years ago, when I got rid of everything Facebook-related, but they still tell people that I have WhatsApp. Every so often I get an SMS from them telling me that I'm missing out, and the people who use WhatsApp to contact me are basically being told that I'm ignoring them.

And, yes, I have closed my account and even emailed them asking for this to be sorted, even emailed them demanding my data under GDPR but they didn't even answer. Why respect my autonomy as a human when they could emotionally blackmail me into compliance?

Telegram is the wild west. Europe tried to do something about it, but russia started threatening with more hybrid wars and revenge. At this point, we have to accept the fact that Telegram is essentially dark web that no one but kremlin has access to.

It's also widely used for selling drugs where I live and no one can do anything about it. Been going on for 2 years now (somewhere in East Europe) with what feels like 10% of the city being part of the group

National data protection authority - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

Tell your countries responsible authority and they will deal with it.

Wow! Thanks for this response. That makes a lot of sense as to how it’s done.

Have you tried been a spambot?