Surely they have access otherwise how do they moderate and investigate account blocks, reports of spam etc. Accounts get suspended, then some automation reviews it, then it escalates to a human, who will have to make a judgement based on some policy. How can they do that if they see nothing? (I’m asking not condoning).
Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption
socsa@piefed.social 2 days ago
It is end to end encrypted but they can just pull the decrypted message from the app. This has been assumed for years, since they said they could parse messages for advertising purposes.
FactualPerson@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Hasn’t it always been that they can decrypt the backups that you personally setup in wa, this way they don’t legally lie to you when the app tells you “this chat is encrypted, even Whatsapp cannot read the messages”.
socsa@piefed.social 2 days ago
Yes, any time you can store and recover encrypted cloud archives across devices, without needing to transfer keys between devices, it implies that there is a key archive somewhere in the cloud. Even Signal struggles to get this both user friendly and properly secure without compromising forward secrecy. I believe they still actually make you explicitly do a local key transfer to populate a new device, even though they have cloud archives now. Whatsapp doesn’t do that. And the app also clearly leaks some amount of unencrypted data anyway, archives or not.