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A comment on Saudi lifting ban on Skype, WhatsApp calls, but will monitor them. Parent comment

Re:Saudi lifting ban on Skype, WhatsApp calls, but will moni... by CogitoCogito on Friday September 22, 2017 @04:13AM (#15310246)
Aren't the whatsapp messages sent over the net? I.e. wouldn't it be the case that the government could only see the outgoing IP address? I guess if they were very well organized and working with the telecoms, they could then maybe see the outgoing IP and assuming that IP were on a telecom network they also controlled they could turn that into a person. This is all assuming that they could even figure out which encrypted outgoing packets correspond to calls (maybe this isn't too bad considering call streams would maybe have a fairly standard packet rate, etc.?).

Either way seems pretty hard without direct help from whatsapp.

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Re:Saudi lifting ban on Skype, WhatsApp calls, but will moni... by ihattendorf on Friday September 22, 2017 @12:01PM (#15313333)
It's Facebook that has access to this metadata.

> While the metadata is encrypted during transit, phone numbers, timestamps, connection duration, connection frequency, as well as user location are being stored on the company’s servers [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06817.pdf

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