EU usually frowns upon that though. Sure, the fines are so small that it’s negligible for Meta, but there should be some fines. But all I find via quick googling are this year’s sanctions over personal data processing in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. The nature of these data is not clear though.

I am not trying to say that WhatsApp is safe to use, mind you. I am pretty sure they will hand over all the info along with encryption keys at first government’s request (or any other highest bidder for that matter), but that’s only my perception of them as a company, with no hard proof at hand.

Why is it legal for them to advertise it as end-to-end encrypted then? I thought the main danger lies in WhatsApp insistence on backing up non-encrypted history to Google Drive/iCloud.

Of course, the existence of backdoors is usually not disclosed (duh), but can they actually read any message?