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A comment on Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face Jail. Parent comment

Re:Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face ... by nindalf on Sunday December 20, 2020 @02:07PM (#25488696)
Because it makes a difference if google can read the messages or not.

- if the messages are shared, google has access to private information they were never explicitly granted access to.

- if an encrypted tar ball is shared, google has access to nothing but a blob of unreadable data.

Isn’t this obvious?

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Re:Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face ... by j1elo on Sunday December 20, 2020 @02:26PM (#25488829)
Google can read the messages. The backups are not uploaded to Google Drive in encrypted form. The WhatsApp FAQ states clearly:

> Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/about-google-drive-ba...

While enabling Drive backups is something that the user has to enable manually, I'm not sure the complete consequences of doing so are really communicated to the user. I wouldn't expect Google having an agreement bypass to access my messages even if Drive backup was enabled, but that's exactly what happens, if I understand it correctly.

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