WhatsApp is E2EE, but Meta controls both ends. Instead of reading your plaintext on the server, they read it on the client. Not that tricky.

I presume the hardest part would be avoiding detection via decompilation and other reverse engineering techniques. Not familiar with that space (can anyone here shed some light?), but it seems likely that an entity with Meta’s resources would be able to figure that out.

E2EE probably protects well against bulk data collection (traffic analysis would sniff out sending 2x volume of data pretty quickly). But something more subtle and targeted, smuggled out in various fields of various protocols, would be hard to detect.

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lxgr 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They only need to get caught doing it once to have a gigantic lawsuit on their hands. They could possibly pull it off very selectively, but doing it in a dragnet fashion seems incredibly risky.

	▲	netsharc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My suspicion is that things like URL previews, or when the app calls a handler to open a link (YouTube, browser), are still monitored. So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category. It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.