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Comment by OtherShrezzing

17 hours ago

This is what a layman would assume happens from Meta’s WhatsApp advertising. They show the e2e process, and have the message entirely unreadable by anyone but the phone owner.

e2e means unreadable by a middleman. That is a small inconvenience if you can readily compromise an endpoint.

  • People keep talking about e2ee as if it was some brain-to-brain encoding that truly allowed only the recipient person to decrypt the message

    • because it used to be that the ends and the middlemen were different entities.

      In the universe where they are the same entity (walled-gardens) there is only the middleman.

      In such cases you either trust them or you don’t, anything more is not required because they can compromise their own endpoints in a way you can not detect.