alt Hacker News> nobody should believe for a second that WhatsApp or FB messages are truly E2EE.
Meta still tracks analytics which isn't good for privacy, but I'm not aware of any news of them or 3rd parties reading messages without consent of one of the 1st parties? Signal is probably much better though
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pixl97 • yesterday at 7:10 PM
>I'm not aware of any news of them
Yet. Until they say "We delete these messages after X time and they are gone gone, and we're not reading them" Assume they are reading them, or will read them and the information just hasn't got out yet.
I mean we keep finding more and more cases where companies like FB and Google were reading messages years ago and it wasn't till now we found out.
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> Meta still tracks analytics which isn't good for privacy, but I'm not aware of any news of them or 3rd parties reading messages without consent of one of the 1st parties? Signal is probably much better though
Correct. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, and there is zero evidence of them reading message contents except with the consent of one of the users involved (such as a user reporting a message for moderation purposes).
(And before anyone takes issue with that last qualifier, consent from at least one party is the bar for secure communications on any platform, Signal included. If you don't trust the person you are communicating with, no amount of encryption will protect you).
Discovering a backdoor in WhatsApp for Facebook/Meta to read messages would be a career-defining finding for a security researcher, so it's not like this is some topic nobody has ever thought to investigate.