Facebook has effectively ushered in the death of encryption. With device-level and at-client snooping to be enabled on Whatsapp, our communications will be only a few keystrokes away for the company. This would mean a government or legal agency could subpoena those comms or bring a warrant to access all of them.
What this means is all the technology that has been put in place to encrypt the end to end communication is effectively useless. Yes, that channel itself is protected from those snooping, but data will be accessed by the service provider at both endpoints. Government agencies demanding access to this data is not the only threat to our privacy here. The service providers infrastructure itself could be attacked, ( we have lost count of data breaches) and hackers could get their hands on our communications. So, Whatsapp’s supposed end-to-end encryption is just a false sense of security.
Read this Forbes article for yourself and see what a dangerous path we are all heading on.
Frankly, I am surprised that privacy experts and agencies are not up in arms complaining about this and fighting this blatant assault on privacy by Facebook and Zuckerberg.
Say goodbye to all sorts of privacy.
