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.
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
An e2ee group chat would need every member to have every other member’s public key. So for 5 people, your client would sign with your private key and send 4 unique messages encrypted each with 1 other person’s public key. Each of them would decrypt their copy of the message with their private key and verify the signature with your public key. So I think what arcterus was saying was that employee who requests access to a user’s messages then becomes just another member of a group chat, but the UI just doesn’t show it as such. Every message you send is then secretly encrypted, on your client, with their special public key and sent to them to be decrypted. That would still be E2EE.
ok yea, I do agree with that POV on it. A ghost key like that would be within spec, cause yea at that point it would just be another member. I wasn’t taking it as an additional group member though, since the whistleblower is stating that they can put in any user id and have access to all messages live, that would mean they would have a ghost user on all messages period regardless of if its a group chat or not.
That wouldn’t be implausible though.
I will say, not too long ago there was some question if I had setup a WhatsApp account with my number due to some emails I was receiving. Not wanting to install the app and unwittingly create an account just by checking if I had one, my wife created a group chat with just her and my number, sent a message, and then we saw it get marked as read by all. Which in an E2EE system should not have been possible without me having the app setup. so I did go ahead and wiped an old and setup the app to make sure I was in control of any account for my number, and I did then receive that group chat. But still, very sketchy.