I don't want Meta AI in WhatsApp, even if it doesn't snoop on my texts

I never expected that they'd put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
It's one of those things that everyone will be crazy about for a week and then... poof, it will just become irrelevant, because it doesn't really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
Maybe it's Zucc's way to get us acquainted with treating bots like humans, so one day he can finally come out as a robot and be accepted by the wider society

I never expected that they'd put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???
it doesn't really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.
A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): "Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world."
What a cringe :(
- Hmm, that makes a little bit more sense, but yes, still cringe corporate move trying to monetize on the AI craze
I'm not sure the robots want him, either.
It's not about what people want, it's about what them want people to use.
Unnecessary feature bloat, that's what it is.
Snapchat did it. Meta needs to do it, too.
Some people are crazy about sites like Character.ai, and people were using chatgpt as their own therapist when it first came out. There's an audience for these types of chatbots

Why would you use WhatsApp in the first place?

It is basically the default in most latam countries.
- Many Asia countries too, probably Europe too.
If you meet someone new they may essentially force you to (through lack of other options), if you wish to communicate with them
- In this case one of two parties must join a new platform. Either they join a privacy respecting one or they can call/text. If they can’t respect that boundary further communication will not be required.
Many countries like the UK charge 35p for an MMS. So to send pictures to anyone you needed an internet connected messenger.
SMS/MMS effectively died here.
So if I want to communicate everyone uses WhatsApp or iMessage
- And most importantly, SMS is not secure [1].
  [1] https://proton.me/blog/stop-using-sms
It doesn't matter what you or I want if people are on WhatsApp, and you want to talk to them, you have to use it.
- You can always use SMS or email, every user has access to one of those services, they just aren't as quick or convenient as data mining shit-apps.

This is why proprietary messaging solutions are bad for both freedom and privacy. You are stuck with antifeatures and you have no way of truely verifying privacy

End-to-end encryption is the best possible safeguard against Meta snooping on your data.

This has always been my biggest pet peeve with WhatsApp. Yes, they might encrypt it all and the encryption might be practically unbreakable, but what worries me is what Meta might do with the private encryption keys. Lem me elaborate further.

I'll start by trying to explain how key-based encryption, the type of encryption WhatsApp uses, work at their core, for those who don't know (THIS IS GOING TO BE AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION). Imagine you want a friend to send you a message with super sensitive contents. Here's what you do to guarantee that no one else can read it but you:

First, you generate two keys, which are pretty much two really big numbers. One will be called the public key and the other one will be the private key.
Then, you go to the person who wants to send you stuff and say "Hey John, remember that really important message you wanted to send me? Take my public key and make sure you cypher your message using it".
Once you receive the message, you decypher it using the private key. Using the private key is the only way you can read this message. You can't use the public key for it because it won't work.

This means that, if someone else manages to get the encrypted message, they will need the private key to read what it says, but they don't have it, only you have it. The only thing they can do keep guessing what that key is until they find what it was and read the message, but that can take up to millions of years, even using supercomputers.

As you can see, this works really well for sending messages without anyone but the sender and the reciever knowing what is being said, and that's why it's so used in encrypted message apps...

...but what if Meta has access to the private keys? I mean, what if, after WhatsApp creating the public and private keys for messaging, the private key is retrieved and stored in Meta's servers, making them able to read all the messages you receive?

Can someone with more experience in the subject say if my concerns are valid?

I have never believed Facebook when they’ve said they don’t have the ability to see your messages. There’s no proof of that whatsoever. And it’s fucking FACEBOOK.
I would be SHOCKED if they didn’t have access to private keys.
I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain... maybe it's not
What I'd be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be "Oh, this person texts their mum every morning", but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be "accused" of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that's besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.
In the end none of us have anything to hide... until we suddenly do
I know this wasn't argued here, but I'd like to make it clear anyways: You don't have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don't want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.
I share that concern and would not rely on my messaging being secure. Anyways as far as they state it themself, your private key for decrypting should stay on your device (in fact it uses the signal protocol and does a few more steps, e.g. to implement shared sessions over multiple devices. You can have a look at their FAQ, they've linked a white paper within it describing the technical details). But the main question is in my opinion: do you trust the guarantees they give you? It's the same struggle as with any proprietary software. You can trust them or you don't, but you will never know without access to the source code.
What do you mean, might? The keys will be stolen and sold to the highest bidder on the black market, probably to state surveillance organizations.

I'm just gonna say, end to end encryption is jack shit when they can just access the content at the source, analyze it with local rules and call sending to meta how often you talk about a certain topic and with whom telemetry

Or for that matter you could just not properly encrypt it

That's a lost fight, at least in my circle and in my circles's circles. It was already difficult to move some of them to Signal and Telegram but even then, they kept using Whatsapp.

It should be managed at nation /European Union level, they should forbid this shit.

Signal is a bad app, you still cannot long press to select multiple photos. You have to select one and then press the add more button, open up a different gallery view and select multiple from there. But they add emojis and remove SMS support so woo. 😞
- Write the code and make a pull request. If you can't, at least open an issue and let them know.
- And this makes it a bad app? Slight inconvenience and some less emojis? You're right that it needs improvement, but I'll happily accept this in exchange for not just another stupid big-tech company snooping around my personal stuff. I'm so fucking pissed at the constant privacy attacks from these evil ass holes

Not if you have friends.
- Well I just converted my friends.
- If they love you they will download an app for you. And it's important to keep in mind that most modern mobile OSes will stop showing notifications from an app or even hide the app if the users doesn't open it after X amount of time.
  So it's up to you to keep the conversation alive enough they get used to using it. If my 83 year old father can, so can your friends.
- Just get your friends on signal or something similar. Friends don't let friends use WhatsApp.
- Or if you want to check your messages on more than one device. I don't like telegram much but I use it because I can access my messages from both my phone and tablet, signal is locked to my phone and my pc.
Not that simple, unfortunately :( The problem is that one particular vendor (Meta) controls the client - the app - to the service (Whatsapp). Right now we can only hope that Signal doesn't add this kind of feature. There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.
- And that's why European Union introduced the Digital Markets Act. By March 2024, Meta will need to give a way for third party clients to communicate with WhatsApp users in 1-to-1 chats. Group chats will probably follow 2 years after.
- There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.
  Yeah, that was a bizarre move, but it doesn't interfere or interoperate with any of its comms functions. Also I have never even read online about anyone using this crypto feature, let alone known any one who did.
I turned everyone around me to Matrix on my own instance. There are other options as well

I don't want Meta in WhatsApp

I don't love WhatsApp*
it's ui is so old!
- It's old but it's still up to date. Meta sucks but the UI of WhatsApp works perfectly for what it is.
- They updated it to material design 2 on the beta app a while ago.
You already have it. Whatsapp = Meta
- Thank you, that was the point.

But AI generated stickers!

Easy, don't use Zuckerbot crap

Not easy when all my friends and family use it
- And in other parts of the world where it's just a standard. I was surprised when I saw WhatsApp numbers on advertisements with the WhatsApp logo. Hard not to be on WhatsApp in those places.
- Also my friends and Family, but this is why I don't use this shit, I can also communicate with them, better still, with a simple call, perhaps with an SMS (yes, it still exists) or directly in person, accompanied with some beers.

WhatsApp seems to be something only foreigners and drug dealers use in my experience. What's the appeal?

You know, when you're one of those foreigners whose peers all exclusively use WhatsApp, be it child or grandparent, that's a pretty big appeal. To me, you're the weird foreigner who doesn't use WhatsApp ;)
- Fair enough, I'm just saying locally no one uses it except really sketchy people who get weird looks when they ask if anyone has it. It's pretty much either Facebook Messenger or Snapchat around these parts.
'Foreigners' to where? The US?
I don't use WhatsApp at all, but it irks me when 'foreigner' is used on the internet as if 'we' are all in a single country.
You're a foreigner to me.
- Yes. I am a foreigner to you. I'm saying, people who emigrate here seem to use it. I'm sorry I didn't type out "people who emigrate here" and used a shorthand term, hopefully someday you can forgive me.
Nahhhh drug dealers use Signal.
- Never even heard of that one.