Which means that authorities can force the providers to inject public keys into the directory services, thus allowing the authorities access to the cleartext. End-to-end is a buzz word. What is important is key distribution, which is set to be subverted by governments everywhere...
Don't think they will deploy great firewall for blocking telegram which operate from offshore.
I dont know why people bring up telegram. A vast majority of chat messages is sent directly in the clear to Telegram servers. Telegram can spy on your conversations. If they can, anyone can. It is NOT an encrypted messenger. It is a crappy plaintext messenger that has an encrypted feature that nobody uses. Also - Stop using telegram. IT IS NOT ENCRYPTED LIKE YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS THINK IT IS.
It does have secret chats, which are supposed to be E2E encrypted
China will glady sell the Indian government GFW technology.
Summary: WhatsApp aggressively pushing online chat backups, to which they do have the keys.
So, are we safe if we disable the backups?
No, whatsapp is not open source. You have to trust facebook on whatever they tell you. Nobody can say for sure that there are no backdoors inside it. If someone says that than they are lying.