WA parent
How is this supposed to work in reality? Do we really want to provide Meta, Apple and Google with a list of phone numbers of accounts of militarly and security personell in order to have their feature-flags for sharing links/photos enabled?
Apple and Google could provide devices or OS versions that disable these features, which could be issued as work phones to military and security personnel.
Not saying it’s a perfect solution, but they might consider it a “95% good enough” solution.
But it's the other way round: people in those industries (can) have those features enabled!
Unless by 'feature' you mean the mandatory scanning?
I mean “software feature” [1]. It is an “anti-feature” for sure, but I’d still call it a “feature” as well when someone has to write a new blob of code to perform a new task.
They already have those lists because those are US companies that famously assist US intelligence. Those flags will be used in multiple incompatible ways, depending on who's asking.
A company assisting the US intelligence will get assigned some contact. They will not get a list of the intelligence staff. That's not the way the information is expected to flow.
Dunno. The exception is a security breach in it-self.
The cellular carriers very obviously already have a system like this for location tracking.
Their tower dumps contain enough metadata to determine all the people who spend most workdays at office buildings in McLean Virginia. And then, of course, where those people sleep (i.e. charge their phones) at night. It takes positive effort to erase that data, and believe me, it's being erased. The powerful people don't want it to exist.
So yeah, there is already a system for doing this kind of thing. It will be extended. Plebs like you and me don't get to use it.
The carrier, for example Vodafone Germany, might have that data. How does that help to enable a feature-flag in US-based Meta's WhatsApp?
facepalm
The problem is that these towers and metadata are hackable by China and Russia, and now you understand how dangerous it is to run Huawei and ZTE etc in your critical infra.
Unless you have positive evidence, I'm gonna guess that the "powerful people" aren't that organized or that on top of things. But, sure, they'd like to be.
> The powerful people don't want it to exist.
Good on those powerful people then, because this data should not exist.