[guiporto]

> Facebook is not a democracy and they can block and censor pretty much any message they like, but now they go on to tell Brazil how it should run its judicial system

Yeah, Facebook is a company - not a country. You can't compare apples to oranges.

Facebook can do whatever it want and people are free to chose to use it service or not. Brazilians had no choice on this case.

[clvx]

Brazilians can use other apps if they want them too. I don't see your point of freedom to communicate being blocked. You're complaining as tcp/ip would've been blocked and it's not. The point here is Whatsapp is not cooperating with authorities, and surely that's not remotely plausible in a state government. I'm not saying they have to weak encryption or putting backdoors, but a reasonable way to help any government with investigations which hurt society in general.

[danenania]

'I'm not saying they have to weak encryption or putting backdoors, but a reasonable way to help any government with investigations which hurt society in general.'

What is it with the "I'm not saying they should have a backdoor, but there should really be [some rhetorically obfuscated equivalent to a backdoor]"?

This is cryptography, not politics. There's no middle ground here. You either have secure communications or you don't. If the data can be provided to the government, that also means it can be leaked, stolen, purchased, spied upon, etc.

[Dylan16807]

Other apps with proper user-controlled encryption would also be blocked.

It is impossible to help the investigations in the way they were asked to while also having proper user-controlled encryption. You are asking for weaknesses or backdoors if you don't recognize that Whatsapp gave up all the information they had, which was nothing.

[visarga]

> Brazilians can use other apps if they want them too.

Having a country change like that does not do good for people. People using dumb phones might have WhatsApp, but not alternatives.

[rmc]

> Facebook can do whatever it want and people are free to chose to use it service or not. Brazilians had no choice on this case.

Fair enough. In which case Zuck should stop all the talk about "[denying] the freedom to communicate the way they want is very scary in a democracy", and just talk about share holder value and market share.

[danmaz74]

> Facebook can do whatever it want

As long as what they want to do is legal.

[CaptainZapp]

Sure they can.

If they don't mind to yell: WE ARE TOTAL AND UTTER HYPOCRITES! to the entire world.

[lucb1e]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

> Facebook is a company - not a country. You can't compare apples to oranges.

That is what I meant, Facebook is not a country and thus they can censor anything. Now, however, they are meddling with a country's government. I am not a big fan of an almighty government in general, but here I am going to take their side and argue Facebook has it too easy with the free beer and rallying people in their favor.