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109

Lawsuit claims Meta can see WhatsApp chats in breach of privacy (www.straitstimes.com)

submitted 22 hours ago by runsmooth@kopitalk.net to c/technology@beehaw.org

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I know many have suspicions of Whatsapp privacy. I know the claim still needs to be proven, but the allegation is troubling.

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[–] tyler@programming.dev 35 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I thought this was well known. That’s why I don’t understand people using whatsapp at all. On android and ios products from the same company can access data between different apps, breaking through the sandbox. So if you have WA and FB installed, FB can see the data in WA and then send it in plain text back to meta’s servers (or encrypting with a key they have access to).

This does not mean that WA isn’t e2e encrypted. That’s why this spokesman can say:

“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesman Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”

And be completely truthful, and yet the lawsuit also be completely truthful. If you can visually see it on your screen then Meta can have access to it if they wanted. You have to actually trust the company behind the software as well and it needs to be open source and auditable and that still isn’t necessarily enough. WA already doesn’t meet two of these requirements so why in the world would you trust it at all?

Here’s an article talking about this on iOS. https://iosbrain.com/blog/2022/05/24/beyond-the-sandbox-using-app-groups-to-communicate-between-ios-or-macos-apps/

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 22 points 22 hours ago

Yeah people fundamentally misunderstand what e2e encryption is.

No one can decrypt it between you and them. However, yours or their device has an unencrypted view of it, so if your app happily transmits all of your data, that doesn't break the e2e encryption.

How do people think WhatsApp makes money?