<story><title>Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?</title><text>Hi all. We&amp;#x27;ve been playing a silly little game with my wife lately: we send each other messages about some topic we never talk about and then wait for ads related to our conversation to start showing up in Instagram. As of the last month, they never fail to show up.&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind that this is a conversation between two &amp;quot;personal&amp;quot; accounts, no business accounts involved. More so, we haven&amp;#x27;t accepted the new terms of use that &amp;quot;allowed&amp;quot; WhatsApp to access messages between personal accounts and business accounts.&lt;p&gt;Is WhatsApp scanning personal messages to target their ads as we are noticing? Weren&amp;#x27;t WhatsApp messages end to end encrypted? Is this a violation of their Terms of Use or am I missing something silly?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>xerxesaa</author><text>As someone who has actually worked on end to end encryption at Meta, I can tell you I am not aware of anything where the company reads your WhatsApp messages - either in transit or device. The company takes fairly serious measures to ensure it cannot even accidentally infer such contents.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what is happening in this specific case. Perhaps the ads came from some other similar search queries. Perhaps they came from the keyboard intercepting what was typed. Or perhaps something else that I can&amp;#x27;t think of. But I&amp;#x27;m nearly certain it did not come from meta intercepting the contents of your messages.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to convince people at this point because many have lost trust in Meta as a company, and I understand that. But I still find it stunning that so many people are making so many false claims without any actual knowledge to back it up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daqhris</author><text>Thanks for your explanation.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t have in mind the scenario of a keyboard logging user inputs besides the normal functionality of WhatsApp. I find this theory to be very plausible. Not at all happy with Meta&amp;#x27;s privacy policy, but I agree that it is worth considering other threats.&lt;p&gt;From using a VPN that logs all incoming and outgoing traffic (NetGuard) on an Android One device, I&amp;#x27;ve noticied that the default Google keyboard gets in touch way too many times with some distant servers. Whereas, an open source keyboard from F-Droid, FlorisBoard, does no snooping and gets updated solely through the app store.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?</title><text>Hi all. We&amp;#x27;ve been playing a silly little game with my wife lately: we send each other messages about some topic we never talk about and then wait for ads related to our conversation to start showing up in Instagram. As of the last month, they never fail to show up.&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind that this is a conversation between two &amp;quot;personal&amp;quot; accounts, no business accounts involved. More so, we haven&amp;#x27;t accepted the new terms of use that &amp;quot;allowed&amp;quot; WhatsApp to access messages between personal accounts and business accounts.&lt;p&gt;Is WhatsApp scanning personal messages to target their ads as we are noticing? Weren&amp;#x27;t WhatsApp messages end to end encrypted? Is this a violation of their Terms of Use or am I missing something silly?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>xerxesaa</author><text>As someone who has actually worked on end to end encryption at Meta, I can tell you I am not aware of anything where the company reads your WhatsApp messages - either in transit or device. The company takes fairly serious measures to ensure it cannot even accidentally infer such contents.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what is happening in this specific case. Perhaps the ads came from some other similar search queries. Perhaps they came from the keyboard intercepting what was typed. Or perhaps something else that I can&amp;#x27;t think of. But I&amp;#x27;m nearly certain it did not come from meta intercepting the contents of your messages.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to convince people at this point because many have lost trust in Meta as a company, and I understand that. But I still find it stunning that so many people are making so many false claims without any actual knowledge to back it up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>5d8767c68926</author><text>Meta has repeatedly demonstrated they will do whatever it takes to capture user data. Kid VPNs, in app browsers, etc. Is it any surprise that people are deeply suspicious of any coincidences that arise from using a supposedly private channel.?&lt;p&gt;Given evidence at hand, it is hard to view Meta as anything but a bad actor.</text></comment>