Comment by netdevphoenix
8 hours ago
> All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits
This is as helpful as Whatsapp's so called E2E encryption comms (that just happens to not be applicable by default in certain situations).
What are those certain situations?
Backups are not encrypted by default. It just takes a single person on the other side of the chat not enabling e2e for your messages to be readable.
Meta data is also not encrypted. Your messaging graph is known to Whatsapp including message timestamps.
Also, IIRC, they (Meta) could also partially bypass the e2e (they can't access past messages but they can receive future messages) without you noticing (unless you have certain settings on whatsapp enabled, settings most people don't even know they exist).
The new feature of sharing past messages with new arrivals to a group also further widens the potential scope of messages leaking.
> Backups are not encrypted by default
And it is very difficult to back them up anywhere other than a secret bucket at Google
Also they say messages are E2E encrypted. I don't recall that page saying anything about what happens at rest. Presumably the Meta AI will have, or already has access to them.