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.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
I never used WhatsApp, but what made people think they used e2e? I’m way passed blindly believing what any company says they do without proof. I’d expect some kind of key or certificate management in the app, is that present?
Heck… my default is still to think every website does plaintext password storage. I can’t prove it, but neither can they. Stop storing my passwords in plaintext lemmy! /s
People expect it what WhatsApp claims it’s E2E encrypted at the start of each chat:
Back at the start WhatsApp wasn’t free, although it was pretty cheap. Then Meta bought it and made it free. Some time after that, the founders left and started Signal.
The E2E encrypted protocol WhatsApp used to use was the Signal protocol. When the OG founders left and created Signal they revamped it, calling it the Signal V2 protocol. Whether WhatsApp still uses that original Signal protocol or not is probably not known to many people outside of Meta, but WhatsApp definitely used to be E2E encrypted prior to Meta’s purchase.
I deleted my WhatsApp account around the time Meta announced they were merging all of their messaging stuff together, e.g. Facebook Messenger, Instagram etc.
Around a year ago WhatsApp had large ads that just said “no one else can read your messages.” I don’t think most people thought that some one could, which makes me wonder why they were paying so much to say it.
Any time they get asked questions like “Are my messages visible only to me?”, they answer with a very canned response like “Your messages are encrypted from end-to-end and can’t be read by anyone while in transit” … or words to that effect. I have never seen them state that no analytics or telemetry is happening on the unencrypted side by the client. Which has always bothered me.