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uyzstvqsyesterday at 2:03 PM3 repliesview on HN

They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.

WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.


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lamaseryyesterday at 5:21 PM

WhatsApp put a (weirdly tame and unremarkable?) image a friend of mine tried to post into review and ended up never letting it show up in a thread, the other day. He was able to post a screenshot of it sitting in his view of the thread, and the message about why it was temporarily delayed (it never showed up, though).

This was in a chat of close friends, not one of those weird huge spammy groups of strangers or something. Nobody was using the report button on him, lol.

We’re all in the US. WhatsApp has some level of awareness of the images you’re sharing, apparently.

jmyeyesterday at 2:17 PM

I’ll preface this with agreeing that you’re probably correct.

That said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta built an intentional backdoor, and that someone else (or many someone else’s) found it and was utilizing it.

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righthandyesterday at 2:52 PM

> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.

So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this…

You’re just here to defend Meta then?

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