Some context from an article in 2018:
https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end-to-end-encryption-does-not-prevent-facebook-from-accessing-whatsapp-chats-d7c6508731b2 said:In August 2016, WhatsApp announced in a blog post that it would begin sharing limited amounts of data with its parent company Facebook. At the time, end-to-end encryption was put forward as a strong privacy safeguard:
“We’re also updating these documents to make clear that we’ve rolled out end-to-end encryption. When you and the people you message are using the latest version of WhatsApp, your messages are encrypted by default, which means you’re the only people who can read them. Even as we coordinate more with Facebook in the months ahead, your encrypted messages stay private and no one else can read them. Not WhatsApp, not Facebook, nor anyone else.”
The language is clear: there’s nothing to fear! End-to-end encryption prevents Facebook from snooping on your chats. And that’s exactly how media outlets understood it at the time. WhatsApp’s Legal page was updated simultaneously, and features very similar language:
“Your messages are yours, and we can’t read them. We’ve built privacy, end-to-end encryption, and other security features into WhatsApp. We don’t store your messages once they’ve been delivered. When they are end-to-end encrypted, we and third parties can’t read them.”
From Zuckerberg's congressional hearing years back:
https://medium.com/@gzanon/no-end-to-end-encryption-does-not-prevent-facebook-from-accessing-whatsapp-chats-d7c6508731b2 said:SCHATZ: Let me — let me try a couple of specific examples. If I’m email — if I’m mailing — emailing within WhatsApp, does that ever inform your advertisers?
ZUCKERBERG: No, we don’t see any of the content in WhatsApp, it’s fully encrypted.
Later, responding to Young:
ZUCKERBERG: (…) That’s how WhatsApp works too, so that’s an app. It’s a very lightweight app. It doesn’t require us to know a lot of information about you, so we can offer that with full encryption, and therefore, we’re not looking — we don’t see the content.Emphasis on therefore mine to underscore how causality is strongly implied between encryption and the impossibility for Facebook to access your chats.But it’s just not true. Facebook could potentially access your WhatsApp chats. In fact, it could easily access your entire chat history and every single attachment. I’m not saying it does, and I have no evidence suggesting that it ever has. But as Android users have recently been finding out that their call history and SMS data had been collected by Facebook, I believe it is important to examine the means by which Facebook is already in a position to collect our WhatsApp data, from any iPhone running iOS 8 and above.
Probably no one here is really surprised that this would be happening. What got my attention is the flat out lying in this situation. It's not like instances of data collection where your information is collected and sold, but the users aren't made aware of it. It's a denial that privacy is a problem, with a claim that you have total privacy.
Can companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook even be held accountable at this point?
