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Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

The privacy policy alone on whatsapp is what is keeping everyone I know off of it. It's egregious. FB is 100% snooping on what is being discussed, and if they are now moving to fully client-to-client encrypted on ALL chats (not just the ones you explicitly choose) it's only because they're losing market share to alternatives that are more trustworthy.

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Whatsapp has been fully e2e for years, maybe since 2016? It uses the Signal protocol.

> It uses the Signal protocol.

Is there any evidence for this? Like any independent audits like Signal and Telegram have for their protocols?

It was done by Signal themselves: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

The client is closed so it can't be independently verified outside of sniffing traffic or decompilation I assume.

As someone unfamiliar with their privacy policy, can you explain what’s egregious about it?

Remember when they tried to force everyone to accept the new terms or they would disable access after a certain date? Then they walked it back after people started using alternative platforms.

https://www.livemint.com/technology/apps/whatsapp-to-make-ne...

The privacy policy was never "walked back", they decided to do it anyway after the controversy (on HN and other platforms) died down.

Here's a newer article showing the metadata being sent to Facebook (presumably for advertising purposes), it includes your phone number, device ID, and location.

https://www.androidauthority.com/whatsapp-privacy-1189873/

> FB is 100% snooping on what is being discussed

Wrong. It has been end-to-end encrypted since 2016. The whole TOS thing was about metadata.

Still I like Signal better, but that's not a reason to be wrong about WhatsApp :-).

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