I've always understood timing, origin, and destination of a message to be metadata. I'm on the fence about the size of the message. Only the contents themselves are definitely data.

Of course, metadata sometimes contains even more information than the data itself, so framing it as "unimportant" is already incredibly dishonest.

I think the open question is how does Facebook make money and justify their expensive purchase of WhatsApp? It still seems to be an open question years after the acquisition.. i think it is fair to bring up that if Facebook wanted to maybe “parse and target” WhatsApp messages they could and also make the statement that they are encrypted end to end. It does make me chuckle a bit though that there is some debate about if zuck can be assumed to be forthright or not.. the frontline episode about Facebook definitely sort of makes you realize that Facebook and mark zuckerberg at least for a long time thought the world needed to catch up to their super smarter than everybody thinking and hey if there are consequences eh that’s the natural course of things..

News from a couple weeks ago was they will start showing adverts in the status feature.

I would think the dishonesty is in the assumption that data and metadata are disjoint. Metadata is simply a kind of data--but it's still data. It's just a kind of data that is particularly difficult to hide--but that obviously has no bearing whatsoever on whether it contains important information.

I'd be surprised if they're not logging the amount of data used (size of message), probably also it's type (voice or video call, or just text - possibly with some sort of attachment), not to mention location data for each participant, and whatever else they can glean - frequency of calls/messages between users for instance, and how that relates to other data FB know about - all sites visited that have social media buttons, as well as what anyone posts directly to their feed.