My lifelong refusal to use Facebook products seems even more justified.
A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app’s parent company, Meta, calls the claims "false and absurd."
As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption.
"A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access—often without any scrutiny at all—and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.
“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated—essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.”
As much as I’d love this to be true, I have to be very critical of any evidence claiming that WhatsApp is not secure.
Is their implementation of the Signal protocol broken? Are they not using the Signal protocol?
Without answers to these questions, I have to assume that anybody could make these claims. Plausible, but without substance.
The same applies to this:
Ok, cool, guy from messenger, which doesn’t even encrypt chats by default. Where’s your analysis?
Sure, the content is encrypted in transit, but not at the endpoints
If you control the app (or the device, eg for non graphene phones) you see everything in cleartext
You make a fair point. Words are wind, as they say. When I read the description in the article describing workers at Meta requesting access from "engineering," I did wonder: how come this is the first we are hearing of this? Meta's a big company. Nobody was gossiping about the fact that employees could read users' messages? Seems like we would have heard about it by now if it was true.
On the other hand: isn't WhatsApp closed source? Aren't users already playing trust me bro with them?
I'm always suspicious of any Meta product, blame it on Mark Zuckerberg's persona as portrayed in the Social Network.
If this is even half true, it’s not “end-to-end encryption,” it’s “trust us, bro.” Hard to square claims like this with real privacy Meta’s track record doesn’t exactly earn the benefit of the doubt.
Estoy de acuerdo los mensajes son leídos y si no están de acuerdo con lo que escribes demoran en salir, quién dijo que el teléfono es seguro se miente así mismo, WhatsApp es tan falsa en su cifrado de extremo a extremo como cualquier otra aplicación de mensajería.