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.
So, is it basically treating every message as a “group” message where it sends it to some system WhatsApp account and then also to your intended receiver? This is what I’m assuming based on them supposedly being able to see deleted messages. Also would let them say it’s technically still “E2EE” since it’s indeed E2EE to your receiver, but it’s also E2EE to them as well.
If that is the case though, its not E2E it’s client server encryption and then server client encryption back. thats just deceptive marketing at that point.
Obviously it’s deceptive. But if you individually encrypt the messages you’re sending, the one you send to the receiver still can’t be decrypted by Meta, only the copy sent directly to Meta can, so the copy sent to your intended receiver is still “E2EE.”
I used to store GPG encrypted files in google drive. But then I noticed bitrot in the stored files which made them impossible to decrypt. So I started adding CRC redundancy through DVDisaster. Which worked but became a PITA. So I finally gave up.
They really want your data.
I don’t agree that would fit the protocol of end to end, that’s a common misconception, E2E by design means that it’s encrypted from the sender to the intended recipient. When you send a message the intended recipient isn’t the server, it’s the user you are sending to. That type of system would be called an encrypt in transit or a server client encryption not E2E. If they are classifying it as E2E that would be incorrect.
A classic example of a server client or encrypt in transit would be HTTPS, the server acts as a middleman between the clients, meaning that it decrypts the message then re-encrypts the message to the designated choice.
With an e2e system, the message the server transmits is never decrypted, the server already knows the destination based off the public key
Ah yes, good old E2E AWA3E.
“End to end, and we are also an end”.
The E is for “Everyone”
The S is for Security.