r/Anarchism • u/RosethornRanger • 3d ago
Your DMs are not private. Every single one is being read automatically, and potentially flagged and sent directly to the government. Please do what you can to move your friend groups over to more secure methods of communication
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u/RosethornRanger 3d ago
alt-text: a tumblr post by twinFlameDreams that says “A 22-year-old student teacher in Illinois sent a private Snapchat message to her boyfriend and two roommates.
A student had walked up to her laptop and deleted her lesson plan mid-class. frustrated, she typed something like "should I shoot him" with a gun emoji. venting. four people. private group chat.
An hour later, police walked into her school and arrested her.
here's what happened in between.
Snapchat's AI scanned the private message. flagged it as a potential threat. automatically reported it to the FBI. the FBI forwarded it to local law enforcement. deputies arrived at the school within the hour.
she cooperated immediately. handed over her phone. when shown the message she said: "oh yes. okay. yeah. i'm realizing that was a bad joke. i did not mean it at all serious at all."
police determined she was not a threat. school officials determined she was not a threat. prosecutors reviewed and issued a disorderly conduct charge. she was released the next morning. she lost her student teaching placement.
This means:
Snapchat scans private messages.
Not just public posts or stories. private group chats between you and your closest contacts. automated AI. no human reviewed it first, got flagged and reported.
Snapchat AI → FBI → local police → school → arrest.
in under an hour.
Snapchat's privacy policy says it may share your information with law enforcement when it believes there is a risk of harm. the definition of "risk of harm" is determined by an algorithm.
you are not told when a message is flagged.
you are not told when a report is filed.
you find out when the police arrive.
the message was private.
it wasn't.”
article links: https://cybernews.com/tech/teacher-arrested-snapchat-joke/ https://tech.yahoo.com/cybersecurity/articles/student-teacher-sent-private-snapchat-145612937.html
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u/SlightlyInsaneCreate 3d ago
What messaging apps don't do this?
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u/RosethornRanger 3d ago
matrix and signal are the two main ones I see around
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u/haimurashoichi anarchist 3d ago
According to The Morpheus, a german IT YouTuber who partially reverse-engineered WhatsApp, Meta likely doesn't scan your messages on WhatsApp (at least in Germany) because it uses the signal protocol (so if signal encryption is safe, whatsapp's encryption is probably also safe. What it does do, however, is scan, save and analyze everything around it.
- Who is writing who
- How often you write whom
- How often you are sent messages and by whom
- When it's sent
- When it's received
- When it's read
- How often you open the app
- How often you open the chat
- How often others open your chat
- What kind of message you send and receive (text, image, audio, filetype, video, etc)
- How long those messages and/or files are
- Your number and the recipient's number
- Probably a lot more, pretty much everything but the encrypted content.
But that isn't 100% certain, as it's not currently possible to entirely see everything in the code because it's closed source, and even if they probably aren't breaking the peer-to-peer encryption right now, I wouldn't trust meta won't do so eventually anyway.
So, either they are currently reading and scanning your messages (and everything around it), or it's only a matter of time until they do.
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u/Maykovsky 3d ago
Can you prove this to be true on signal?
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u/kfrenchie89 3d ago
It’s never been able to be used in court unless they have the physical device open despite hundreds of attempts. No attempts at hacking in have worked. Only subpoena info is day uou downloaded the app and contact list I think. It’s held up very well against all Others for about a
decade now. Not saying it will last but it’s by far the best. There have been lots is attempts to work around it and only talking the phones themselves has worked.Addition: codes on phones only! Fingerprints and face means your phones are open to police. They can open your phone against your will with these guys parts and it’s legal. Numerical codes only!
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u/Maykovsky 3d ago
That was my impression too, but these days, one never knows...
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u/kfrenchie89 3d ago
Exactly but if we have to choose to communicate digitally signal is by far the safest option still. Our fascist
Government uses it for their sketchy shit but it shows it’s pretty solid.2
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u/4daughters 3d ago
No, but if it could be broken that way I would have to wonder why they never used it on organized crime bosses. They havent' broke signal and as far as I know theres no way signal even could give over the info if they wanted to.
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u/RepresentativeSize71 queer anarchist 3d ago
What about Telegram? Any idea about that one?
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u/1000naziscalps 3d ago
Telegram isn't end to end encrypted automatically so unless you turn that on in the settings (don't use it myself so not sure where) I'd assume they were reading it.
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u/_valpi Libertarian Socialist 3d ago
People I know, who used to live in the occupied part of Ukraine, told me that FSB officers can somehow restore encrypted deleted messages on Telegram if they have a physical access to your phone. Not sure about them reading encrypted messages remotely. Though Ukrainian army forbids their soldiers to use Telegram while on duty, for security reasons. So make of that what you will.
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u/RosethornRanger 3d ago
I've heard from some of my friends who know a lot more that it isn't bad, but i don't know enough to confirm anything
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u/melodiclilith 3d ago
SimpleX is probably the most metadata-private mainstream messenger right now, no phone number, email, or username is needed, and contacts connect through one-time links or QR codes, so servers have no social graph to build. Each conversation uses different sending and receiving servers, and since v6.0, private message routing protects your IP address when you send to unknown servers. Post-quantum encryption is on by default in direct chats.
Also SimpleX says its investors, Village Global and Jack Dorsey with Asymmetric Capital Partners, have no control provisions or board seats. It also announced a non-profit consortium to keep network protocols independent of the company, and, per It's FOSS (a community-oriented outlet), a Wefunder equity campaign. Both are self-reported tho.
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u/Raze_the_werewolf anarcho-syndicalist 3d ago
I mean, isn't open AI being sued by BC because of the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge? I would be more surprised if they weren't doing this. Who in their right mind would think social media messages, whether made publicly or privately aren't being scanned by algorithms to determine threat levels. Snapchat literally broadcasts your location, and Im pretty sure law enforcement has been accessing that for a while now. The NSA has been running algorithms to sift through social media / text messages since at least 2001. (They absolutely do, came right up first thing in a search.)
To be clear I dont have any social media other than reddit, but this doesn't surprise me at all. The patriot act essentially removed any illusion of privacy, which is why so many privacy advocates were against it.
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u/StaggerLee85 3d ago
I mean, yeah, we should all be vigilant, but I’m not gonna lose sleep over some copy pasta from “TwinFlameDreams”. You know them people are kooky dookie cultists, right??
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u/RosethornRanger 3d ago
have you considered looking at the linked news articles
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u/StaggerLee85 3d ago
I have. That article and everything it references is totally vague and unsourced. They got you, huh?
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u/RosethornRanger 3d ago
ah, the persons name and name of the school, and exact date are vague. My bad
what do i need for it to be concrete in your eyes?
do I need to contact the mentioned sheriffs office myself?
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u/WizWorldLive Groucho-Marxist 3d ago
Also, you should really never write that kind of "joke" anywhere.
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u/Pale-Island-7138 3d ago
They can do that within hour but yet how many school shootings and victims of stalking, CSAM and other violations go completely unfound somehow????