this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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My best guess is you have numbers associated with profiles and maybe the numbers get reported as scams through various watchdog orgs or people reporting to Meta directly?
The profiles aren’t encrypted I don’t think?
What's your best guess at how whatsapp manages to generate AI summaries of your private messages without ever reading the private messages?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-ai-summarize-your-whatsapp-chats
Even a cursory attempt at defending these companies is a bad joke.
First, if I were to take a guess I would assume that it can be coded to give the AI read/write access to messages because it’s part of the encryption protocol without giving it to Meta as a company? I really have no idea because I don’t write code or deal with backend stuff so it’s just an idea.
Second, I’m not defending the tech company. I’m coming up with a hypothesis as to why something may be possible. I’m not saying it’s probable.l because we both know that Meta will find any way to gain access to data by doing any sort of shady shit they can.
That’s not really how encryption works. If their chat bot can read/parse the message, then it has the keys, which means meta would have the keys. This doesn’t mean they absolutely are reading your messages, but it does seem to mean it would be possible.
No it doesn't have to, their article says if you enable it, the messages are resent someplace. Of course those that are have to be read by whatever summarizes them, so are not secured from Meta.
Honestly for systems operating on sequences of tokens, like those "AI"'s, I wonder if it's possible to divide their functionality so that it would be a zero-knowledge system with the side providing computation not being able to decipher them.
In the dumbest sense, if some operation can be reduced to multiplication of two numbers, or modulo 2 addition, or whatever, and those two numbers encrypted and combined thus result in something predictably decrypted by someone having encrypted the original numbers, then you can offload the hard operation to a remote service and not worry about them learning what the numbers really were. There are probably articles and whitepapers describing how to do exactly this, fundamental science is usually beyond what's been done practically.