As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.”
“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
15 years ago I’d have called this a conspiracy theory given how the evidence seems to be anecdotal, but given literally every single other thing we’ve learned in recent times about cartoonishly evil and lying the tech bros truly are, it seems entirely likely.
s/the tech bros/humans/
Despite “the tech bros” really being that, I’m learning over time about some people surprisingly cowardly and evil, while looking like better versions of me, and some other people looking pretty normal and usual, while being epic and tragic heroes, and some other people looking like a typical Nazi 80 years late to the party, yet more honorable than many, and some other people looking like weak and nice versions of me, while having real warrior spirit.
You have no idea how big the world is in all dimensions. We are all looking at it via our daily interactions, via news and internet discussions, via games and via books, and we don’t see what’s deep inside. Well, I suppose, people who read classics can see something.
And they, these people on top of big tech, being just human, have such powers. What can they do with them? Perhaps we should forgive them for not being wise in deciding to have those powers, and praise them for doing less evil with them than they could.
So. Perhaps in 15 years you’ve just grown.