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.
WhatsApp is using Signals protocol for communication: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I don’t fully understand what it entails, but from what I understand is that yes, WhatsApp is using the same encryption and message flow that signal uses, but you’re still using Meta’s app, and they can just read the plaintext message from there.
To my knowledge, under Signal, the encription keys are locally generated and stored, and the traffic flows between end points as a closed packet.
This does not seem to be the case here, as the keys are generated and stored outside your equipment and, thus, are viable to be used by a third party to access packets.
But I admit I speak heavily burdened by technical ignorance.
My understanding is they’re sending a request to your device that then decrypts and uploads messages, not storing the keys outside your device.