Two questions.
My family insist on using Whatsapp for the family chats. I have to keep a copy on a device just so I can communicate with them. I do so under protest, as I was always told it isn’t secure. My brother has just said
“oh Whatsapp is encrypted, it’s perfectly secure”.
First, is it actually as encrypted and safe as my brother claims? That would solve everything.
Second, if it isn’t, where can I get some proof that we should switch to Telegram or whatever? Proof which doesn’t make me look like a raving loony?
Corporations love to lie with almost truths, or incomplete truths. So sure it might be end-to-end encrypted between two users, and each message is also signed with a special key that the corporation can view, or that some trusted third party carnivore system could view. That means they didn’t lie, it is end to end encrypted, it’s just three-way encrypted instead of two-way encrypted.
Or it is end-to-end encrypted across the network, but the edge devices, ie the phones, have search capabilities built into them to deliver the messages back to the organization based on some match capability.
And as other people indicated, closed source you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know what’s changing, you just don’t know