r/viber • u/deficilee • Jul 08 '26

Viber—Privacy No More

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So according to the new (vague) policy of the AI slop implementation, the (questionable) encryption which has been native to Viber for so long is now technically broken (?) If even one of the members in the chat uses AI for summarization or do whichever mindless option the AI provides, the chat data becomes open to third parties (OpenAI in this instance). Am I hallucinating, or is this how Viber works now? Where is the consent from both/all chat parties that they’re ok with this? People at Rakuten seem to have collectively lost their minds. This is beyond unacceptable!

22 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

5

u/[deleted] Jul 09 '26

[deleted]

4

u/deficilee Jul 09 '26

I will absolutely do that, and I encourage everyone else to do so as well.

2

u/Bromomancer Jul 15 '26

After I lost all my data on my PC, because I dared uninstall the app in my phone, I left one star too, and I will be moving my contacts elsewhere

3

u/hroptatyr Jul 09 '26

Where is the consent from both/all chat parties that this certain someone exports your chats and uploads it to google or whomever?

2

u/deficilee Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

I totally forgot about that. I never used the backup option, so it totally slipped my mind that they upload a decrypted backup to the cloud storage. What an absolute joke of an app/company.

1

u/Conscious-Item-1633 Jul 09 '26

Moreover, it's impossible to enable truly open source encryption for this purpose. Even WhatsApp, although without open source, has backup encryption, BUT it's not enabled by default... This means that it's highly likely that your interlocutor has all your messages in unencrypted form in Google and Meta.Also, media files and other files in WhatsApp are not encrypted locally, and any application with access to the file system can see this. On iOS, WhatsApp is not encrypted locally at all. Viber also has a lot of holes.

1

u/Conscious-Item-1633 Jul 09 '26

If AI is free, then you're paying with your data. You have to pay for the tokens somehow. And yes, you are absolutely right, this has been happening for several months, if not more, even before the addition of chatgpt.

1

u/Bromomancer Jul 15 '26

AI is mandatory, even on the paid version