Privacy

I feel like this is getting at something interesting and revealing but I am not convinced by what it says.

"There is no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta," the agent wrote in the email. He added that "Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings" in an unencrypted format.

I highly doubt this is true. This is because there are third party clients such as https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp that send E2EE encrypted messages on WhatsApp. If literally all messages where available in an unencrypted format it would mean one of the following things.

• The E2EE protocol is broken and Meta knows the "crack".
• That official client does a completely different protocol which uploads all messages in addition to doing the E2EE protocol.

Security are also reverse-engineering the official client. So if it was regularly doing this I would assume someone has noticed.

What I suspect is happening is that some features in the client (like Meta AI) are very easy to frequently activate and upload a large amount of messages when Facebook then archives. It would be quite likely that the average user is using these frequently. This could reasonably result in the vast majority of messages being available to Facebook.

But I think if the reports are exaggerated it doesn't help sell the case.