Post #1528786

2026-04-17 14:46 UTC

> As far as I know, no social media company’s posts are E2EE Oh, sorry, I shoulda been specific. I meant cases like the Whatsapp class action. It hasn't been proven in court yet, tho. The prosecution says they have evidence Whatsapp and Meta get access to E2EE messages since they control the client. But it's also important to say that Meta is denying they do this. It will play out in court. > The 52-page privacy lawsuit contends that although Meta has pervasively marketed WhatsApp as a private, secure, end-to-end-encrypted messaging service where “[o]nly you and the person you’re talking to can read or listen to” messages, Meta employees, Irish consulting and tech firm Accenture and possibly other third parties, unbeknownst to users, can access messages via a “backdoor” in the WhatsApp source code. According to the complaint, the backdoor allows Meta and WhatsApp employees and/or third-party contractors to “circumvent the encryption in order to view users’ private messages.” Whether it's proven, or not, it's *possible* to do it. The mesages have to be decrypted for view. > and there are no deliberate backdoors and such Agree, but that condition is doing some heavy lifting. As in the alleged Whatsapp case.

Replies (1)

@yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-04-17 20:24

Yeah, that's again a little different. You have to fully trust WhatsApp that they are doing what they promise. You can't really verify this yourself. Besides, if the app is open source, backdoors are generally more difficult to implement. Especially for something like E2EE, where people look very closely at what the application does with keys. Same with age verification in my opinion. You'd need to pull off a lot of gymnastics to put in a backdoor, see the xz utils one which was only achieved through several obfuscated stages in a codebase rarely ever looked at by another human.

Open ##1528787