Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.
I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.
Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.
Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.
Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.
So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"
Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.
Are you sure you haven’t previously searched for window gates? Searching for things is so second nature by now that half the time we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.
Also, if your partner or anyone in your house searched for gates from the same IP, you will be getting ads for gates too, even if you never searched for them personally. That's a very common source of the "I never searched for something and now I'm getting ads for it" complaints.
Positive that I didn't search. I viewed the apartment, and several others, while my wife was in Taiwan with our baby. After I got home (existing apartment in SG) I text (on whatsapp) the agent about this specific apartment. I had not even raise the issue of the lack of gates with my wife yet. The ad's began about an hour after I messaged my agent.
couldn't have they added some kind of mechanidm to extract unusual words in the app itself to feed a separate stream of "interests" ?
It doesn't even have to be sent over the network. Could be a shared file on an app group that apps like facebook read and process.
IP address is one of many signals used to build a statistical profile.
It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.
If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.
I think this has started happening to me lately! I use pihole with the default block lists as well (in the US), which of course doesn’t get everything, but generally works pretty well.
So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop
Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.
That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.
So literally defeating the purpose of e2e encryption where the conversations are between me and the other person. Not parsed prior for advertising. In any case people should avoid WhatsApp as it’s clearly less secure now that Facebook owns it.
That in and of itself is a testament to how problematic our man-made legal system is.
Compare a nature made system to a man made system.
Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.
There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.
