According to Meta Whatsapp is E2EE and Data requests by government agencies can only reveal metadata like recipients, durations of calls, frequency of messages, but not content of messages.
"Hey Timmy I noticed you talk to Susan 5 times a day sometimes for 5 minutes and sometimes for 2 hours. Always right after you say goodnight to us. Sometimes I see you call her late at night from outside her house for 10 seconds when you were supposed to be in your room and then you don't use your phone again for a couple hours -- No no, im not invading your privacy, it's only metadata"
The basis of using a service is that you entrust them with the care of your necessity. That they make it unable by policy not to look at the contents of your mail is a nice feature, but nor necessary, as we firstly rely on the good faith we put on the service provdider. To go ahead and request that the security measures be extended to data necessary to route communications, is of a pathological paranoic nature.
The mailman needs to know the address.
Mailmen who don't require your address to deliver may appear as competitors, but they will always be a shady second choice, because mailmen need to know your address.
I believe the internet should be treated like the mail, but until the government actually steps in and takes ownership of it, they have no business having access to the metadata necessary to route packets, let alone the logs of those routings, and certainly not any additional Metadata that is not part of the routing function
Meta data is often as valuable or even more valuable than the data itself.
Because you might be talking to the mob boss about the weather. But the fact that you are talking to the mob boss is an extremely interesting data point. It pins you to the map in a way that you are immediately a POI and causes a file to be opened on you and your other contacts to further map your place in the network. Who talks to who is very powerful information.