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 mean yeah, I get that… but why would I believe that? Its trivial to add a label in an app and make it say that. I’m questioning trust here. My question should have rather been: why do people trust Meta will do exactly what they say? Its Meta, that immediately sends alarms to my brain saying to stay cautious. Like I said, there’s no way to verify what that piece of text says and the people who would be interested in e2e encryption are also that kind of people who should know what a trusted authority is.
No inherent reason to believe that, but seems like lying about this should be illegal. The belief is in Meta’s compliance with the law rather than in its ethics, which, according to these claims, is unfortunately an unfounded belief.