The complaint cites “whistleblowers” as having helped bring this information to light, though it doesn’t explain who they are.
No substance yet.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I thought this was well known. That’s why I don’t understand people using whatsapp at all. On android and ios products from the same company can access data between different apps, breaking through the sandbox. So if you have WA and FB installed, FB can see the data in WA and then send it in plain text back to meta’s servers (or encrypting with a key they have access to).
This does not mean that WA isn’t e2e encrypted. That’s why this spokesman can say:
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesman Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”
And be completely truthful, and yet the lawsuit also be completely truthful. If you can visually see it on your screen then Meta can have access to it if they wanted. You have to actually trust the company behind the software as well and it needs to be open source and auditable and that still isn’t necessarily enough. WA already doesn’t meet two of these requirements so why in the world would you trust it at all?
Here’s an article talking about this on iOS. https://iosbrain.com/blog/2022/05/24/beyond-the-sandbox-using-app-groups-to-communicate-between-ios-or-macos-apps/
Yeah people fundamentally misunderstand what e2e encryption is.
No one can decrypt it between you and them. However, yours or their device has an unencrypted view of it, so if your app happily transmits all of your data, that doesn't break the e2e encryption.
How do people think WhatsApp makes money?
I used WhatsApp to stay in touch with family overseas until Facebook announced the acquisition. I'd already been off Facebook for years, never used Instagram and had zero interest being Zucked back into that orbit.
Since WhatsApp claims to use the Signal protocol in the first place, why not just use Signal and skip the data collection?