They will most likely share metadata about you with facebook to sell that data to push more ads into your face.
They may very well sell also data to insurance companies making it harder for you to get insurance.
Options are limited only by who would like to pay for info about you.
Its rather a question about “How much you value your privacy?”
Ps. Ppl using facebook from the go “do not care about their privacy” so I dont know how much more it will affect you.
This is incorrect. The sender's device generates the key with which it encrypts outgoing messages. WhatsApp's infra cannot see the content of any messages sent.
(Source: ex-WhatsApp employee)
I mean, it's certainly possible to have an administrative backdoor that just shares the local keys. Even when that wasn't the case when you worked there, and even if we believe that you say the truth: we still cannot be certain that this won't change on February 8th.
I mean, whatsapp was remotely exploitable for more than 5 years before it was discovered (just to make a point).
WhatsApp could almost certainly perform active MITM
This (the warning) is only possible if WhatsApp can read your messages
I'm guessing that they read your message on the app. So their claim (end-to-end encryption) is indeed true and correct.
But their app can and indeed has been reading your messages, for the past, at least, 3 years
Which I personally don't mind, when it's done fully automatically (no humans involved) and only for this kind of uses (to warn users of dangers)
The app sends a request to a Facebook API for every link that you send/receive. Usually this returns the little image + text snippet that you see in the app, but obviously this could also return a message that the link is considered dangerous.
As a site owner you can probably see a request from a Facebook bot when a link to your site is shared on WhatsApp. (not sure how long they cache this)
I mean, I can't guarantee it. As others have said, it's not impossible that things have changed since I left or will change in the future. But I doubt it — e2e encryption is a big selling point for WA and something that is dear to the company's heart.
> And how about received messages?
It's the same deal — the sender encrypts the message with the the recipient's public key, and the recipient decrypts it with their private key (which was generated locally and never goes over the network).
> How can you retrieve all your old messages/conversations when you install the app on a new device? Don't they come from WhatsApp servers?
No, you can only get old messages from your old device or from a backup that went to the cloud somewhere (e.g. iCloud or Google backup). The messages on your phone are stored locally in a DB, so if you copy that DB to a new phone it'll have the new messages. WhatsApp doesn't store messages — they are only present on WA infra until acknowledged as received by the destination.
I have a question to ask. How would this work? Even if for a second we assume that they're able to read all our texts etc., how can they curate that information with insurance companies? What data might the insurance companies be interested in? I would not (and I'm assuming a lot of people would not) specifically enter my age/health issues/Blood Pressure information on Whatsapp.
> They may very well sell also data to insurance companies making it harder for you to get insurance.
