The metadata of someone's communications can be almost as damning as the content. I would guess that if the FBI could merely have a list of who their suspect contacted over an app, and when, they'd have 90% of what they wanted.

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rhizome 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding is that in the vast majority of investigations law enforcement will be satisfied in learning only who you're talking to, i.e. "just metadata" is fine, and dangerous.

	▲	3eb7988a1663 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It seems reasonable. Even those who are sloppy with their opsec probably do not detail the entirety of the plan via digital mechanisms. Being able to identify likely collaborators is probably sufficient to infer some specifics of an activity.

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palata 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I would guess that if the FBI could merely have a list of who their suspect contacted over an app, and when

Well with WhatsApp they most definitely can, but it has never been a secret. WhatsApp always had access to the metadata (whereas Signal makes a lot of effort to reduce the metadata they have access to). In ~2016 WhatsApp integrated the Signal protocol to add end-to-end encryption, but did nothing about the metadata.

Again: if you care about privacy, use Signal.