Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.