Is Facebook Secretly Spying On Your WhatsApp Messages? ForbesTech
Initially there was confusion about WhatsApp’s encryption being breached, that its end-to-end encryption is not as private as we all think. This shows the level of misunderstanding about what end-to-end encryption is, and what it is not. There is no encryption breach here, and thankfully ProPublica clarified the misunderstanding.
“WhatsApp provides a way for people to report spam or abuse,” the platform confirmed this week, “which includes sharing the most recent messages in a chat. This feature is important for preventing the worst abuse on the internet.” ProPublica rightly points out that WhatsApp also shares a lot of metadata with law enforcement. “WhatsApp shares metadata, unencrypted records that can reveal a lot about a user.” This has always been an awkward subject for WhatsApp—rival Signal collects no metadata and proudly markets its inability to provide data when asked.
Specifically, the “end-to-end” covers the encryption of data between you and your counterparties, where only you and those counterparties hold the decryption keys. The platform over which you are communicating cannot hold copies of those keys or decrypt and re-encrypt mid-transit, as doing so means it is not truly “end-to-end.”
With the WhatsApp example, a user at one of the “ends” must manually send content to WhatsApp, it is not done automatically. This is not a compromise. If WhatsApp were to add an AI monitoring filter to its app, automatically forwarding content to those Facebook reviewers without any manual intervention, that would be different. That would be a compromise and reason enough to question WhatsApp’s security. But there is no suggestion or claim that WhatsApp is adding app-based AI monitoring.
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