The lawsuit cites ‘courageous whistleblowers,’ but provides no technical evidence. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, calls the claims ‘absurd’ and warns that it plans to countersue.
How anyone would believe Meta wasn’t full of shit about privacy is a moron.
It has been public for a long time that they have access to your contacts and metadata (who you talk to, how much, when, from where, etc.) That was bad enough. But this is the first time I’ve heard about accessing message content. Really chilling.
I don’t use WhatsApp, because I’m a homebody and none of the ten people I want to talk to use it. (Plus,.meta. Ugh.)
But the test for “is their encryption good enough to keep them from reading your messages” really needs to be “can you trivially lock yourself out of sent messages”.
If it’s easy for you to set up a new device and chat with your existing contacts without manually entering a code, then it’ll be equally easy for them to set up a fake device pretending to be you and read all of the same things.
They dont have to decrypt the channel. The app just has to run a screenshot every half second or so and pass that back to an ai/ ocr and there you have it.
Surprised more people werent up in arms when ms proposed that, uh, ‘feature’ for windows.
