▷WhatsApp, privacy and censorship 🥇

A few months ago a colleague objected to me: "... the conversations are secure, they are encrypted from point to point and the WhatsApp servers do not save anything".

If the conversations are point-to-point encrypted, it means that no one, except the sender and the receiver, can read everything that is being transmitted.

So I proposed a very simple experiment. I recorded a video to generate heavy material and sent it to him, calculating the time it took to send it. It took a few seconds, maybe 7 or 8 seconds. Then I told the receiver to forward it to a third partner, and he did. In this case it came instantly. How is it possible?

The 3 of us were abroad (without wifi) and we were using the same mobile network (they were work lines). Has the line suddenly increased the speed that much? Or the third partner's file does not come from the second partner's mobile phone but was already stored on a WhatsApp server?

So, it seems that WhatsApp stores our communications, but not only that, it knows what is in each of them, because it knows how to separate the communication into pieces (here this text, here this image, here this video ...). If it were an encrypted point-to-point combination, no one would know that one content or another was sent.

Then came the censorship

Recently, with the arrival of Covid, Facebook (the owner of WhatsApp), has decided to help us all by protecting us from hoaxes. So now we find that some content can be forwarded to multiple people at once and others can only be sent to one person.

But didn't we agree that the content was encrypted and secret? How does WhatsApp know that these meaningless encrypted bits are real material? How do you know that those bits that no one can read are good content and that it can be forwarded or bad and that its sending should be restricted? ...

And beyond

At this point it seems that WhatsApp knows what we send, stores it and also decides what is good and what is bad, what is the truth and what is not or, at least, what is forwarded to more people and what is not ..

What if tomorrow it occurs to you to go one step further and not allow certain content to be forwarded? Or simply send them ... Not to mention that, knowing what's inside you can do more things like collect behavioral information, modify it, etc ...

We already know that Facebook does not have many scruples in selling us and that is ... "who pays is the boss." Who pays Facebook? So, you see… the advertisers and it's they who need it, its users are just raw material. And not to be seen ... maybe other "entities" that can pay you with money or with other things that Facebook wants or needs.