> WhatsApp end-to-end encryption or even better

so they claim… not that fb has ever given us a reason to trust them.

Why risk lying about something like this? It makes no business sense, and I can't imagine the Facebook employees being so loyal as not to spill the beans here.

Really? Then explain this:

https://newatlas.com/computers/facebook-not-secretly-listeni...

And this:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/facebook-app-caught-activating-ph...

And this:

https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-facebook-data-share-not...

And of course this:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...

Buried in the Propublica piece (2021) is the ELI5 of the fundamental uncloaking mechanism:

>WhatsApp reviewers gain access to private content when users hit the “report” button on the app, identifying a message as allegedly violating the platform’s terms of service. This forwards five messages — the allegedly offending one along with the four previous ones in the exchange ...

This may not have much to do with the more specific abuse case of criminal financial conspiracies.

That’s not the point. The issue is whether Facebook has surreptitiously gotten data you don’t think they’d be getting, and get caught doing it. With regard to video audio and metadata the answer is YES. Will you now trust them with your “encrypted” conversation content?

I am still waiting for someone to explain me why you can forward medias (image or videos) in whatsapp to new recipients without uploading it again completely if those images and videos are encrypted with the public keys of your recipients.

Since the forward is instantaneous and not involve a reupload, it looks to me the files are cached on the servers. If the recipient can see thee files and they are encrypted, it means that the server itself encrypted it using their public cryptographic key. If the server can do that, it means it either: - can decrypt your own files - cache them unencrypted

Correct me if I am wrong.

It is easy to test by sending a large video recording over a crappy connection, then forwarding it to another recipient. First upload can literally take a minute or more, the second action is immediate.

Consider the following:

You encrypt and upload the media to the storage server.

You share the download URL and key with person #1

Now how long would it take to forward that same message with the url and key to person #2...n?

Are you saying they would be using symmetric encryption?

Not necessarily, sender generates a private key for the piece of media, and shares the public key for that media item along with the download location to person 1&2 over their encrypted chat channels.

Zoom risked lying out this.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/

You don’t need to trust Meta, there’s tons of regulatory oversight

I doubt that more than 1% of people using WhatsApp actually care about E2E encryption

Yes, most people are using whatsapp because it was one of the first to use phone number as account handle and to dig into your contacts to find. No risk of mispelling a complicated account name, auto discovery + group chats. The rest is inertia helped by the additions of features like voice messages, video calls, stickers way way way before encryption in order to stay current with the competitions.

If you ask most people how can they be sure that meta is really encrypting end to end, most shrug off saying that meta already knows everything about their lives through FB, Instagram anyway.

Signal is not designed for situations where an intended recipient is intentionally aiding an eavesdropper. It does not prevent an intended recipient from making copies of messages via the regular clipboard even with disappearing messages turned on, and even if it did, could not stop someone from taking a video of their screen.

that’s different than cryptographic proof someone sent the message. anyone can fake the above.