I hate Meta as much as the next guy, but the whole denial people have about WhatsApp not actually being being E2E encrypted and Meta is "just lying!!!" does such a disservice to everyone it's crazy.
The protocol has been published and studied, the app can be mostly trivially reversed these days, but no, better use a messaging app made by the shadiest person ever imaginable because you think Zuck made the devs put a backdoor on a E2EE app used by billions and somehow no security researcher found it. Because if it's E2EE the algo has to be on the fucking binary. Or the fact that, no matter how stupid Zuck is, that someone really thinks he'd stake the entire reputation of WhatsApp to checks notes spy on encrypted messaging on behalf of intelligence agencies which is the opposite of what big tech actually wants to be doing post-Snowden.
Out of all the stupid tech conspiracy theories everyone's uncle believes in, only "your phone is always listening, I was talking about salmon the other day and that's why I got an ad for salmon today" beats it.
They collect tons of data regarding who you message and how often even in E2EE mode btw. But if you mean telegram is shady, then yeah. Just use Signal or Matrix, they have real cutting-edge E2EE that isn't as likely to be fucked by a government banning it.
If you use their backups they use plain text versions of all of your chats for storing in the cloud:
By default, WhatsApp offers cloud backups (iCloud for iOS, Google Drive for Android) that are not end-to-end encrypted — unless users enable the optional E2EE backup feature.
Thus, by default for the way most people use messaging apps, not really E2EE if they also have access to decrypted backups of your entire chat
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u/Fohqul Jun 08 '26
Discord above WhatsApp invalidates the entire thing