cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they’d not be caught, because it’s an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.
Is WhatsApp open source? Even Signal I’m a bit on edge, why would you trust WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook?
WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free
encryptedmessaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they’re charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn’t come free and unlimited on most plans).It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There’s already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn’t because they simply don’t store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they’re encrypted by design.
no, their major point was offering free messaging in regions where people were being charged per SMS sent. end-to-end encryption has been introduced in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#End-to-end_encryption), seven years after it’s been founded and two years after Facebook acquisition.
E2E only protects data in transit. Unless the pair also encrypted their data at rest, their messages will still be easily accessed in plain text by their cloud backup.
they actually do encrypted backups nowadays.
By default or is it opt-in? Glad to hear that they have taken steps to remediate the biggest weakness of their service.
IIRC it asks if you want to enable backup, and when turning on backup it’s an option to encrypt it with a key or password. So by default there’s no backup at all.