[Namari]

The article says Whatsapp will now share:

    * User phone numbers
    * Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books
    * Profile names
    * Profile pictures and
    * Status message including when a user was last online
    * Diagnostic data collected from app logs

and already was getting:

    Purchases
    Financial information
    Location
    Contacts
    User content
    Identifiers
    Usage data and
    Diagnostics

[castorp]

Doesn't this mean that anybody agreeing to those terms needs to ask permission from each and everybody in their address book?

And if they don't, can I sue them (at least in the EU) or ask my contact to be removed before the agree to the terms?

[yulaow]

technically it is facebook in violation of GDPR considering that all the data in the addressbook is easily considered personal data for a commercial entity and so facebook should ask the permission to each owner of those numbers before collecting them.

[omk]

https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/contacts/about-contact-uplo...

Based on this they do not store information of users who have not signed up and only store a cryptographic hash. The hash isn't created on the device, so the servers definitely get it.

[pfortuny]

There are just 10^9 phone numbers in Spain. Say 0.01 sec/hash (which is A LOT), you have 10^8 seconds. You can decrypt all the hashes in 0.3 years...

"Cryptographic hash" is as bullshit as "MD5 encrypted passwords".

[daemin]

Or you know just create a rainbow table of all the phone numbers in the world and match the hashes against that. Would probably be faster.

[Rygian]

If I'm being optimistic, the hashes of a user's contacts are salted with the user's own phone number, so the space could be 10^18.

[stiray]

Just a small detail about cryptographic hash:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

"‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;"

Cryptographic hash of phone number is still uniquely identifying natural person and is by GDPR still under the definition of personal data. The GDPR authors knew what they were doing - or they were lucky although also other parts of GDPR suggest that they had some technical think-tank behind it.

Anyway, hashing doesn't solve anything, whatever "obfuscation" is used/invented, as long as information points to "natural person" it is considered personal data.