this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Meta is claiming that it's end-to-end encrypted, however, WhatsApp is proprietary (no-one can check how it's implemented) and I'm not aware of any auditing ever being done. You just have to take their word for it. For a long time, the automatic message backups were all unencrypted and stored on Google or Apple Cloud, so that was the most obvious backdoor they implemented. I'm not sure how they are doing it now.
Claiming that something is encrypted gives participants a false sense of security, in which they would say more than they would normally do if they knew that their messages are public. The Crypto AG and Operation Rubicon is a great example of backdoored encryption, sold by intelligence companies.
Fair point about the backups, but I was mostly referring to the messaging aspect. As far as I know they use signals e2e encryption protocol, so it should be fine for personal use. Would also be illegal for Meta to use message contents for anything really, as they say they don't.
If we are talking about activism, politics and so on, then surely Whatsapp is not enough. But I was mostly talking about the ad-related context.