341–343 of 343 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminiscent of their heavy handed approach to disabling watch history on YouTube, even when paying for YouTube Premium. (Google punishes viewers who make themselves less valuable to advertisers by giving them an entirely blank homepage.)
Shhh! Don't let Google know about this trick. I've gotten stuck in approximately 0 doom scroll loops since disabling view history and I'd like to keep it that way.
How does it work technically? Does Whatsapp expose these messages via an API? If yes, then it seems like this is not only on Google. If no: Are they reading data from raw UI widgets? Are they intercepting input controls? Are they intercepting network traffic? That seems unlikely, given its probably end to end encrypted and the decryption happens within the scope of the Whatsapp process.
My understanding (may be wrong): WhatsApp data is encrypted, however, the keys are on the device itself and accessible on Android. There are many third-party apps that support transferring WhatsApp data from one phone to another, and some even claim so between Android and iOS devices. As I understand, the chats are in some usual database format. So anyone having access to the device can read the data even without Wha…
At the very least you'd need to root your device, but even that might not be quite enough going by my memory of trying to export my chats once. I remember the only documented working path included something like installing a shady, modified APK of a legacy WhatsApp version with an outdated encryption method to a second device and then somehow getting the new app to write a backup in the legacy format, to then restore to the fake second device and decrypt. I quit there because the risk of actually losing my entire backup seemed too high. And that was about five years ago, so I'd assume if anything, it's even more difficult today.
How does it work technically? Does Whatsapp expose these messages via an API? If yes, then it seems like this is not only on Google. If no: Are they reading data from raw UI widgets? Are they intercepting input controls? Are they intercepting network traffic? That seems unlikely, given its probably end to end encrypted and the decryption happens within the scope of the Whatsapp process.
>Does Whatsapp expose these messages via an API? Whatsapp has dark patterns that "guide" you to "archive" your chats on google drive.
I'm not saying it's impossible that Google just grants their own app an (IMO indefensible) exception to this. But the potential shitstorm would be massive, so I assume they probably use some other way, such as screen recording or accessibility features.