WhatsApp is back in the news after two recent developments:
First, a lawsuit has been filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, citing a whistleblower, that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access, according to Bloomberg, virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications. The claims that some Meta staff had “unfettered” access to WhatsApp messages is also being investigated by the US Department of Commerce.
The second is from yesterday, where the Supreme Court of India hauled up Meta in court, or its challenge of a CCI order saying WhatsApp abused its dominance by enforcing a privacy policy change in 2021. The CJI and other judges, and the Solicitor General of India made some interesting comments in court.
Here’s my take on all of this:
1. WhatsApp’s should allow its encryption claims to be independently audited: While WhatsApp asserts that its messages are end-to-end encrypted and inaccessible even to its own employees, allegations in U.S. lawsuits challenge this claim. To resolve doubts, WhatsApp should open its implementation of the OpenSignal protocol to public and independent cybersecurity audits. This would allow external verification of whether end-to-end encryption is truly enforced in practice, not just in theory. I know Will Cathcart has made some statements about the allegations being false, but I think WhatsApp needs to now do more than address these allegations with transparency, because they hit at one of the key claims that the company makes, that are critical to many legal cases, not in the least, its challenge against the IT Rules in India which sought to unravel end-to-end encryption.
2. Signal’s silence is troubling: the silence of Signal, when it comes to these allegations, is deafening for me. While Pavel Durov (Telegram) has spoken up publicly against these allegation, I do feel that Signal has some responsibility here to address these concerns. Non-technical people like me trust WhatsApp’s encryption because it has Signal’s name attached to it. We push back against criticism of Signal because we trust people like Meredith Whittaker who is at the helm of Signal.
We do not know whether Signal is in a position to audit WhatsApp’s E2EE deployment, but if its name is attached to that deployment, then Signal has a key responsibility here. Else, it should come clean and distance itself from WhatsApp’s implementation, which leave the ball entirely in WhatsApp’s court.
3. WhatsApp’s privacy policy changes are not a problem: for me, at least. Yes, WhatsApp said there would be no advertising on the platform, both before and after the acquisition. Neeraj Arora, then business head at WhatsApp, who eventually went to try and build his own messaging app Hallo, said to me in 2014:
“Our philosophy has been very clear from day 1: Anything that clutters the experience is not going to be done. No games, no gimmicks, no ads. With Facebook or…
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