Someone mentioned on the reddit thread that after 200+ comments noone actually questioned if the story is true.
On HN, there is one comment, and it does question if it's true. GOOD!
I am curious if it's real or not. My bet is it's not. It's easy to screw up some downloading logic with overflows, one-off errors etc, but since WA is E2E encrypted, it would need a lot more "accident" in code to make this possible.
But this is about backups and the fact that this guy bought a new phone and started a data restore for Whatsapp from GoogleDrive, what if something is wrong there, maybe the backups are not even encrypted, even though everyone thinks they are.
A second redditor has reported the same behaviour, although it's in the same (seemingly inappropriate) subreddit and was posted 4 hours later so it may just be a copycat:
On HN, there is one comment, and it does question if it's true. GOOD!
I am curious if it's real or not. My bet is it's not. It's easy to screw up some downloading logic with overflows, one-off errors etc, but since WA is E2E encrypted, it would need a lot more "accident" in code to make this possible.