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There’s a difference between willingly handing over information and being required to by law, though, right?
I’m no Meta fan, but presumably if they were served a warrant they can’t just say no?
That’s one of the benefits of E2E encryption, where nobody but the users have the keys. The company can say no, because they simply don’t have access to see them.
Came here to say this. Without e2e encryption there’s no way for them not to. And most big companies like this are in bed with the federal government and wouldn’t really entertain that seriously.
Also they want to be able to scrape/sell your chat data so they don’t want to encrypt it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't WhatsApp meta and encrypted?
It’s been a while since I looked it up, and I don’t use WhatsApp, but I believe it’s E2E encrypted but the mechanism they use allows their servers to also hold the keys to decrypt.
Presumably they hold a master key that all other keys are derived from.
Yes. This does make it very convenient to just hop on web.whatsapp.com without also having your phone online.
WhatsApp's fine for talking to normie friends who won't ever switch to something else, for managing business clients, etc. But it's something to be aware of.
The world would be a better place if we all used Signal, XMPP, etc.
How can we monetize the contents of people's direct messages to each other if we support encryption?
<checks notes>
Oh. We can't. Decision made, then.
Signal protocol for all the things.
Only, then you can't get paid for snitching... (You get to charge the government for all those requests... and you basically get to set the price.)
Right. They could implement E2E encryption, they just don’t want to - entirely plausible it’s because they don’t want to say no.
More likely it’s because they want the data :)
So what's stopping them from encrypting end-to-end?
If they enabled it they wouldn’t have access to all of that information they can profit off of.
Technologically they could do it, they just don’t want to.
So it seems that the problem is with Meta and NOT them being a "good guy" but law forcing their hand?
Oh yeah they definitely aren’t to be seen as the “good guy” and they absolutely could make it impossible to hand over.
They are deciding to favour data/profits over people’s privacy.
BUT the distinction should still be made that they could be made to do it, regardless whether they want to.
Then there’s the whole other conversation around back doors (like the government asked Apple to do in their iPhones).
Ah yes. All those fines and laws they regularly break, of course now is the time they'd be law abiding executives. Only when it means selling out some pleb and it doesn't hurt their profits. Then of course John Doe here who gets $0 for representing Meta on the web comes for the rescue of our great benefactors.
You’re straw manning. I didn’t say they act in good faith, but it’s important to make a distinction between them handing over the information and being made to.
For all I known they do hand it over willingly. I don’t know.