Posted by mdhb 5 days ago
So not messages.
From the article: > including contact information, IP addresses and profile photos
I can confirm this, I used to work at WhatsApp.
You're still just blindly trusting this is the case. You can't verify the encryption or any of the code.
It would be trivial to actually encrypt the message and send it out and then store an unecrypted version locally and quietly exfiltrate it later.
They have to already be storing an unecrypted version locally, because you can see the messages. So unless your analyzing packets on the scale of months or years, you cannot possibly know that it isn't being exfiltrate at some point.
Take it a step further: put the extiltration behind a flag, and then when the NSA asks, turn on the flag for that person. Security researchers will never find it.
Academics have also reverse engineered it as well, and though there are some weakness it's not a lie that WhatsApp is E2EE. Here's some I just found:
- https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/794.pdf
- https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Wednesday/us-19-Zaikin-Reverse...
My man, Meta were caught torrenting/pirate books to train the garbage that is llama. Meta enabled a couple of genocides including the one in Myanmar. Meta suppressed reports on children safety (Washington Post probably is also activist journalism, right? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/09/08/met...).
We are not surprised at all that s company that has been consistently evil, is evil again.
I don't believe they've lied to me – I'm not so uncharitable as to assume their incorrect "it's written in the policy!" claims were deliberate lies –, but they're certainly not forthcoming.
That, or you have a vested interested in making sure that your stake in Meta does not depreciate in value.
From enabling genocide in Myanmar, to interfering with elections, to giving user data to third parties in violation of its own daya policies, to straight up weird stuff like pirating/torrening books to train their steaming pile of garbage called llama, to having sex chatbots be weird to children.
And then there is the even weirder decisions of zuck, the biggest loser of all:
- VR didnt seem to catch on
- the metaverse is a giant smelly pile of poo and he sunk millions in it
- he is hiring AI engineers at absurd money in a rapidly cooling bubble market
- he immediately started ass kissing the orange stain that calls himself president
Is he purposefully trying to be a caricature cartoon vilain, a grotesque loser, and his company an emblem of evil? Or is it just cluelessness?
He sunk tens of billions.
Estimates (because we don't have "Reality Labs" broken out before 2019) put Zuck's Metaverse Misadventure & Boondoggle about $75B in the hole ($10B revenue on $85B spend) with no signs of a turnaround in revenue.
There are plans to turn things around with AR spectacles but decent ones are years off and will require entirely new investment with little re-use of that $75B Metaverse nonsense (Oculus acquisition, 5 generations of Quest R&D, Horizon Worlds, partnered and sponsored games and content, etc.)
The only real ROI will be the experience and staff gained. The rest will almost certainly land in the dustbin.
FTA:
> Attaullah Baig, who served as head of security for WhatsApp from 2021 to 2025, claims that approximately 1,500 engineers had unrestricted access to user data without proper oversight, potentially violating a US government order that imposed a $5bn penalty on the company in 2020.