[zer0zzz]

How so? Most of the hardcore encryption stuff was built at Facebook under the founder's supervision afaik for the purposes of making it harder for Zuck to inevitably ruin the privacy aspects.

I personally don't use it, because it _is_ loaded with engagement bait but its not all worse and is better in some ways.

[myng111]

From an infrastructure PoV, I seem to recall that WhatsApp was one of the few major companies that used Erlang, and were famous for being able to run the entirety of WhatsApp on only a few servers, each of which was serving millions of concurrent connections, mostly thanks to Erlang/BEAM (at least, from what I read). When it got acquired by Facebook, they then proceeded to rewrite the entirety of the backend in C++. Seems kind of baffling to me.

[inigyou]

They added ads, an "AI companion", and backdoor logging of all chat messages

[otterley]

That last one’s going to need some substantiation.

“In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them.” (https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967)

[inigyou]

I believe it was the automatic unencrypted weekly data upload to Google Drive

[otterley]

Can you post a link?

[inigyou]

No. It's a special arrangement between Google and WhatsApp which makes a file only visible to WhatsApp, and not appear in your regular drive so you can't do normal cloud file operations like generating public links.

[otterley]

Without evidence of this “special arrangement” I don’t see why anyone should believe you. You made a claim that is directly contrary to WhatsApp’s published materials and they have a lot to lose if you are correct. On the other hand, if your accusation is false, it’s tantamount to libel.

[gmerc]

Reconning. We made it so Zuck had plausible deniability for all the bad shit happening on WA as a direct result of anticipated regulatory pressure.

There is no “make things harder for the dictator” at Meta/Fb and never has been.