You can't unless you've chosen to back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud/Google in which case it's Apple/Google responsible for preserving the messages and subject to their encryption standards, nothing to do with Meta.

Try logging in on a new device and putting your main device into aeroplane mode as soon as the login succeeds. Loading of old messages on the new device will stop.

Moxie Marlinspike (founder of Signal) [0]implemented the same E2EE algorithm as Signal (Signal Protocol) into WhatsApp, but that was 10 years ago, so who knows if things have changed since then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike

Practically speaking, it isn't secure; no closed app can be. It receives regular compulsory updates (old versions refuse to work) and there's nothing at all stopping Zuck from sneaking in backdoors targeted at you personally.

Yeah, that's a good workaround. Google Voice can work too.

Unfortunately, more and more services are declining to send to VoIP numbers because of seCurItY, so it's a game of cat and mouse.

Fortunately SMS is so expensive in parts of Europe and it's not allowable anymore to use SMS by itself for online payment authentication, and both issues combined have slowly been pushing companies to explore alternatives.

There unfortunately seems to be no such pressure in the US. Passkeys could solve the issue, but probably increase support request volumes enough for most companies to not bother unless forced.

> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.

Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.

That's still one device. If you turn the primary phone off, the secondary device stops working. WhatsApp just proxies everything through the primary device, it's like WhatsApp Web.