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.
insert pikachushockedface
It would not be surprising if found to be true. Difficult to see how the current business model operates at a profit. Their long term goal is the usual loss leader model until a monopoly is achieved and then slug us with ads, sell all the data, hike the price, etc. Sickening to watch them cosy up to fascists. They are probably supplying any and all the agencies with intelligence scraped from their user base. If Facebook were a person they would be a psychopath.
If Facebook were a person they would be a psychopath.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg kind of is Facebook, and he’s a psycho.
I would argue that the vast majority of users don’t use WhatsApp for privacy. In the UK at least, it’s just the app everyone has and it works. I’ve actively tried to move friends over to signal, to limited success, but honestly it can be escaped how encryption is not it’s killer IP.
WhatsApp client is closed source. Any claims around E2EE is pointless, since it’s impossible to verify.
What?!! No. The owner of WhatsApp would never lie to us.
A lot of victim blaming in this thread. Why can’t you just be mad for someone who was deceived?
Because it’s the gazillionth time the exactly totally absolutely same kind of shit happens with the very exactly same company that didn’t even try to hide who they were.
And next week the very very same deceived people will be of Facebook, Instagram, etc. And maybe, just MAYBE they’ll migrate away from Whatsapp… to join another proprietary network of another billonaire’s controlled megacorp.Because I’m tired of being “that pain in the ass” when barely suggesting to use something else all to see at the end people crying over things they’ve be warned about.
If a kid burns themself once on a kitchen’s hotplate, you assume they learnt their lesson in an unfortunate way despite all the warnings.
If adults keep burning themselves over and over… and over and over and over, at which point are you entitled to say they’re part of the f*cking problem??I’m sick of Mark fucking zuckerberg.
If i was the mad king of the usa all of those tech bros would be in a jail in el salvador.
OH JUST USE SOMETHING ELSE!
I do but that doesn’t stop that ugly weak fuck from stealing from my business every chance he fucking gets.
Im not a big fan of meta and WhatsApp, but these claims are a bit much. Any employee gets access to messages through a well documented internal process? “No separate decryption step is required” , so the WhatsApp CLIENT is not doing any actual e2e encryption and no attempt at reverse engineering or traffic analysis has ever seen that this is the case?
Where can one see, what these whistleblowers have actually published? I would expect to see this “simple process” and how that interface actually works… And I would expect any journalist to request some proof (show me the last message i sent to Alice) before trusting an anonymous whistleblower making such an extraordinary claim.
From what I heard so far, that anonymous whistleblower could be a troll or an ex-employee who just wants to cause some trouble for meta.
We should not trust anything blindly, even if it fits with our view of the world. Meta is an evil company, but as long as there is no indication for these specific allegations to be true, we should treat them as unfounded allegations.
Ending encryption is Meta’s end so they can spy on everyone and help governments do so as well, so they therefore have an end to end encryption. Oh, y’all thought the app had true E2EE such that even Meta with their surveillance capitalist business model couldn’t access your data? 🤣
Only a tech illiterate can expect privacy from a closed source program, open source is a requirement for both privacy and security.
Even if that’s all true, it’s not evidence that the end to end encryption is broken.
That sort of debug access could simply be included in the clients.
I’m not sure if it’s the encryption part you don’t understand, the end to end, or both.
I understand perfectly well, it’s you who doesn’t.
If the illegitimate access happens on the client which is the endpoint of the e2e-encryption then it doesn’t say anything about the e2e-encryption working or not working. On the endpoint the content is always available decrypted, for user consumption
The “encryption for two different receiving sides” part is the one that you, in turn, might have missed. WhatsApp client might just send messages to some additional technical party, which is not your buddy.
You gatta be real stupid to not realize that Facebook is harvesting your data.
I’ve always considered iTunes to be one of the worst pieces of software ever written, but WhatsApp is a very close second.
No surprised at all tbf.
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Proposed line of defense: “With all respect, M. Judge, with all the different times we fucked our users, lied to them, tricked them, experimented on them, ignored them, we already sold private discussions on Facebook in the past, our CEO and founder most famous quote is «They trust me, dumbfucks!», the list goes on and on: no one in their sane mind would genuinely believe we were not spying on Whatsapp! They try to play dumb, they could not possibly believe we were being fair and honest THIS time?!”
