Technology

So that ad campaign that they ran saying no one but you can see your messages. That was a bit strange that they were pushing it, since no one appeared to be saying otherwise, might be a lie? I never would have guessed.

I work at Meta and interface with WhatsApp enough to know a couple things. First of all, data is encrypted at rest; that's not even a WhatsApp thing, that's literally how our infra works (it's actually an efficiency thing, since deletions requires only deleting the key). So the "source" of the article saying

"Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings" in an unencrypted format.

Is either lying or wrong.

Second of all, the encryption is legit. The only time "Meta employees" and "Contractors" are seeing your message content is when someone reports your message; because the person reporting it is sending a decrypted copy.

It may be true that there is some sort of device-level backdoor on your phone, or possibly that there's a remote switch of some sort to send a second copy of the message in decrypted format for some targets, but I have not heard or seen this.

Fyi I use Signal and not WhatsApp, but in general I don't think this article holds much weight

Anyone who thinks Facebook would give you end to end encryption is a fucking fool.

If you think ANYTHING owned by FB is "secure" you had this coming

They own the (closed source) app, which has full access to your decrypted messages. The messages might be e2ee in transit, but they must be decrypted for you to read. This means that they also have access to them in this state, the same as you, and there is nothing preventing them from resending those decrypted messages back to their servers while you send them (before they encrypt) or after your receive them (after they decrypt).

Didn't read the article, but maybe a back door to spy on people?