<story><title>WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11431108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11431108&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/04/forget-apple-vs-fbi-whatsapp-just-switched-encryption-billion-people/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>visarga</author><text>&amp;gt; The encryption genie is out of the bottle&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech. If anything, we’re bringing that back to individuals.&lt;p&gt;I think on the contrary, the surveillance demon is out of the bottle. It&amp;#x27;s too hard to hide metadata such as ip addresses in communications; in many places Tor is blocked, browsers can be fingerprinted, typing style and writing style can be identified by statistical methods; we depend on auto-updated operating systems that might be backdoored in the future or are already backdoored and even if we have an &amp;quot;untraceable&amp;quot; system, we can&amp;#x27;t possibly use our old accounts were we logged in with our real name, or using our real IP address in the past. So, anonymous web use is not as social as plain web use. Besides, we already leak too much data through our GSM phones, at least to the carrier and the state agencies that log the user data.</text></comment>