WhatsApp is being repeatedly sued alleging that it's lying about its end-to-end encryption
I obviously don’t know the truth of the situation any more than any other random person does. But it feels concerning that Meta seems to be facing at least 2 court cases accusing them of lying about how WhatsApp is super secure and, specifically, end to end encrypted. At least I think it’s two separate cases?
A new class-action lawsuit accuses Meta Platforms of misleading billions of WhatsApp users by claiming their messages are protected by unbreakable end-to-end encryption.
Filed in the San Francisco federal court, the suit alleges the company secretly stores, analyzes, and grants employee access to chat contents via internal tools.
And then there’s this:
The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.
To be clear, previous investigations into the topic don’t seem to have produced a lot of evidence that this is the case - and it would be a particularly egregious sin for Meta to put out a lie of this magnitude.
But, as a previous security researcher noted, there’s no way for the average nerd in the street to know:
He said the closed source status of WhatsApp makes a definitive assessment of the code impossible
A previous audit found a different security issue with Meta employees being able to arbitrarily add anyone they wanted into otherwise private group messages, the implications of which may be dangerous given how much supposedly top secret business gets conducted via WhatsApp.
Signal apparently never had this problem - and we’d know if it did because it’s open source - so hey, why not just use that instead under the precautionary principle if nothing else? If only everyone else agreed huh.