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WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

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Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#4

Post by 0xy »

Absolutely, it can be encrypted all they want and it's totally irrelevant given all the plaintext chats get stored straight in Google Drive (if you didn't, your conversation partners did!).

Then for some reason WhatsApp has far more critical no-click or 1-click exploits than Telegram, which has 30 global employees? Huh? There's several thousand working on WhatsApp. Telegram has more features, too. WhatsApp has less surface area, more employees, more exploits.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#5

Post by EGreg »

I’ve been saying this for years — when people derided me on HN — that we need decentralization and open-source backends, because we are relying on pinky-promises. We need attestation that we can trust.

I have been building it, piece by piece. Some pieces have been recently featured (last week) in trusted security publications:

Safecloud: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

Safebox and Safebots are coming too: https://safebots.ai/about

You won’t need to take anyone’s word for it. And in fact, end-to-end encryption will become unnecessary.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#6

Post by dotcoma »

0xy wrote: post #4

Absolutely, it can be encrypted all they want and it's totally irrelevant given all the plaintext chats get stored straight in Google Drive (if you didn't, your conversation partners did!). Then for some reason WhatsApp has far more critical no-click or 1-click exploits than Telegram, which has 30 global employees? Huh? There's several thousand working on WhatsApp. Telegram has more features, too. WhatsApp has less s…

It’s a feature, not a bug.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#7

Post by soblemprolver »

The article opens with a statement by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov who claims that WhatsApp shared Messages with third parties while Telegram "never did and never will" do that.

Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it? What I mean is: The message is encrypted on the sender's device and can only be decrypted on that and the receiver's device.

Telegram uses transport layer encryption that leaves all messages exposed to the servers an their admins. Last I checked, there was a E2E feature but every room I opened would just stop working after a while and my contacts were very confused about that. Large rooms weren't possible.

I have no idea what Meta/WhatsApp may or may not be doing but this article opens with Telegram and doesn't pick that up anymore. Makes it feel like a telegram ad.

The rest of the article may be fine but it's very lengthy and goes somewhere to show that dispite using the Signal protocol, WhatsApp cloud backups can be decrypted, I think. The Telegram ad was too irritating to give the article a fair chance, to be honest.

XMPP, Matrix and Signal are there, too.

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