Facebook employees use burner phones to talk about the company amongst themselves without being tracked

[DavidKalinowski]

4 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

IIRC couple years ago burner phone became a lot less easy to acquire without putting your name to it. But they're not trying to hide from government investigation, they're trying to hide what they say from facebook, who's not quite as powerful as the government yet. 

last I checked a basic trafone just needed a zip code to setup service. even if it did need more info, pull a rando name from your ass and a made up address or the address of some rando, and your good to go. There is no [legit] identity verification in setting up a prepaid phone. (I sold them for 13 years.)

[Syntaxvgm]

4 minutes ago, DavidKalinowski said:

last I checked a basic trafone just needed a zip code to setup service. even if it did need more info, pull a rando name from your ass and a made up address or the address of some rando, and your good to go. There is no [legit] identity verification in setting up a prepaid phone. (I sold them for 13 years.)

either recently you need an ID or the law didn't pass, I'm not sure. I do know every prepaid service I've bought in the past couple of years needed an ID, I don't know if this is voluntary on the companies part (strait talk for example) 

I know every few years there's some bill introduced to ban them or require ID, I just thought one passed for some reason idk. 

[DavidKalinowski]

16 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

either recently you need an ID or the law didn't pass, I'm not sure. I do know every prepaid service I've bought in the past couple of years needed an ID, I don't know if this is voluntary on the companies part (strait talk for example) 

I know every few years there's some bill introduced to ban them or require ID, I just thought one passed for some reason idk. 

It may have, I have been out of the retail game for a about 3 years now. I know on contract phones ID is required. a cursory google search looks like a bill was propsed back in 2016 but I cant find any thing requiring it.

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Lol every company in China has horrible working conditions. Foxconn and others don't just make things for Apple. Used to be Philippine sweat shops for clothes

Just because every company does it, doesn't mean its right. 

[MoonSpot]

5 hours ago, Syntaxvgm said:

I think after the second soda wars and the great age of forced corporate mergers, we will be left with Disney and Alphabet, who will merge into our new wonderful corporate masters!

Think I've seen the days of future past documentary of that mega corp, but they opted for a new name instead of a straight up amalgamation.

Personally I'm more of a "Clamp Premiere Regency Trade Center and Retail Concourse" fan than an Omni fan(Investors about page, buy now! Best price, love you long time), but it's hard to argue with OMNI Corps numbers.

 

OT:  Though I can easily see FB wanting a phone policy just for protecting and monitoring to protect company secrets;  With FBs record I can't escape the impression that its really about preventing even more damning dirty laundry from getting aired out.

[bowrilla]

2 hours ago, Taja said:

...use whatsapp? End to end encryption, so unless they LITERALLY wire their personal phones, they will have privacy?

 

Am I missing something here? Not a security expert on the slighstest, but it sounds weird to me.

WhatsApp belongs to Facebook and end to end encryption will be weakened from 2019 on so that they can add content aware ads. 

[Syntaxvgm]

5 minutes ago, bowrilla said:

WhatsApp belongs to Facebook and end to end encryption will be weakened from 2019 on so that they can add content aware ads. 

"I dont understand why they just don't use the facebook thing to hide from facebook"
To add- ti's not about the messages being intercepted, it's about them being ripped from the phone. They are like worried the bundled facebook app on phones (that you can't remove) rips data from other apps, including what an encrypted app displays. They would know best, they literally made it. 

 

Literally a headline from today 

Quote

Internal documents suggest Facebook might have exploited Android APIs to collect call and text data without permission

https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/12/05/internal-documents-suggest-facebook-might-have-exploited-android-apis-to-collect-call-and-text-data-without-permission/

[bowrilla]

1 minute ago, Syntaxvgm said:

"I dont understand why they just don't use the facebook thing to hide from facebook"
To add- ti's not about the messages being intercepted, it's about them being ripped from the phone. They are like worried the bundled facebook app on phones (that you can't remove) rips data from other apps, including what an encrypted app displays. They would know best, they literally made it. 

Which is pretty tricky since all of it runs sandboxed and a good messenger app design will prevent that. And my phone didn't come with fasebook pre installed. If you're worried, just root your Android phone and make sure there's just the software on it you actually want. 

 

2 hours ago, avg123 said:

You dont know what agreements facebook has for data sharing between different apps. Heck facebook may even own stakes in 100s of apps through their VCs.

 

I think the facebook employees are well aware of this and thus are using burner phones. Heck they are facebook engineers. I would guess they are smarter than the average schmuck.

Threema is open source, Signal and Telegram had independent audits afaik. A good end to end encryption ensures that nothing can be intercepted and with a proper app design there are no memory leaks. Of course if you use React (Native) (which is open source) made by facebook and you as a developer hid stuff in there (which would be stupid since it's open source and very popular) any app might be compromised but. That's pretty unlikely. 

People often assume insane amounts of trickery with modern technology. The reality is often far more boring. A German data analyst just looked into Social Bots on Twitter with a focus of the US election - turns out, there are hardly any out there and those that are have little reach and are easy to spot. Don't get me wrong, some crazy stuff is possible (like infecting printers with a tampered PDF to infect the rest of the network).

[Taja]

23 minutes ago, bowrilla said:

WhatsApp belongs to Facebook and end to end encryption will be weakened from 2019 on so that they can add content aware ads. 

I know it belongs to Facebook, but if ita encrypted end to end, then NOBODY can access it right? So at least for now it would be pretty safe?

[bowrilla]

1 minute ago, Taja said:

I know it belongs to Facebook, but if ita encrypted end to end, then NOBODY can access it right? So at least for now it would be pretty safe?

That is as long the client itself isn't sending data to other people. Your encryption channel might be safe but that's not given for the app itself if it's not either open source or at least has been subject of an independent audit.

 

23 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/12/05/internal-documents-suggest-facebook-might-have-exploited-android-apis-to-collect-call-and-text-data-without-permission/

Read the article. Looks a bit fishy, yes, but Facebook's argument is right: those leaked documents show one side of the story. A side that has an interest to back up its own claims against facebook. And the article says it itself: metadata. The US military might kill because of metadata but connections between coworkers are hardly a sign of suspicious behaviour.

[BuckGup]

4 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

Just because every company does it, doesn't mean its right. 

Right I am just saying it's not exclusive to any company

[KuJoe]

What is wrong with people these days? If you have to jump through hoops to talk badly about the company you work for because they track your phone usage... go find another job, it really is that simple. The problem is that the people hate the company until they get their paychecks.

 

I have my own issues with Facebook, but now I have even more issues with the people working there who are either too greedy, too stupid, or too immoral to go some place else allowing Facebook to continue the same practices the employees claim to be angry about.

[Trik'Stari]

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Why the fuck are they working for Facebook then?

"because someone else will do it for less".

 

Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. As far as I can tell, humanity as a species has not developed a way around this other than "destroy the thing causing it".

[W-L]

@Syntaxvgm Please don't forget to also include a quote from the article in the main thread as per the posting requirements, once updates it may be reinstated into the Tech News section. Currently it has been moved into General Discussion. 

 

 

[corrado33]

11 hours ago, samcool55 said:

Let's hope they do it properly!

It takes a lot of dedication to properly use burner phones.

 

Isn't it just.... "buy with cash" and "keep it off at home?"

[corrado33]

What's even funnier (in my mind) is that it's relatively easy to set up a SSL encrypted tunnel between computers on the same network which a chat program could be piped through. Unless facebook can crack RSA encryption (they can't) it's perfectly safe. 

 

Which must mean that facebook employees are stupid. 

 

Unless keyloggers are installed, but I feel that'd be pretty easy to find.

[avg123]

4 minutes ago, corrado33 said:

What's even funnier (in my mind) is that it's relatively easy to set up a SSL encrypted tunnel between computers on the same network which a chat program could be piped through. Unless facebook can crack RSA encryption (they can't) it's perfectly safe. 

 

Which must mean that facebook employees are stupid. 

 

Unless keyloggers are installed, but I feel that'd be pretty easy to find.

Maybe they have a rule for no other chat programs other than messenger and whatsapp.

 

Not everybody that works for facebook are engineers. They have lawyers, HRs, financiers, janitors etc.

[corrado33]

2 minutes ago, avg123 said:

Maybe they have a ule for no other chat programs other than messenger and whatsapp.

Portable chat applications exist. And if you're talking shit about the company are you REALLY going to care about company rules? 

[avg123]

1 minute ago, corrado33 said:

Portable chat applications exist. And if you're talking shit about the company are you REALLY going to care about company rules? 

Yes people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. Most people hate their jobs anyways. Its not unique to facebook. Unlike most companies, facebook can track you and fire you if you text "My job suckz" to your friends.

[Syntaxvgm]

2 hours ago, W-L said:

@Syntaxvgm Please don't forget to also include a quote from the article in the main thread as per the posting requirements, once updates it may be reinstated into the Tech News section. Currently it has been moved into General Discussion. 

 

 

fine whatever done. 

Paraphrased that tiny article, adds nothing, but sure. 

edit 

 

[bowrilla]

11 hours ago, corrado33 said:

 Unless facebook can crack RSA encryption (they can't) it's perfectly safe. 

That highly depends on the key exchange. There are attacks on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange that can reconstruct the key and start a man in the middle attack. It all comes down to how secure a connection and the encryption is implemented.

11 hours ago, corrado33 said:

 Unless keyloggers are installed, but I feel that'd be pretty easy to find.

Unless those keyloggers are not installed on OS level but in UEFI - or the OS's kernel has been modified. Or the USB ports have been tampered with. Or they're using terminal servers that log everything. Or the keyboards have been tampered with. Numerous attack vectors you won't notice.