Original post text
Given the recent detainment of a French person who got detained because he said something bad about the current administration in his WhatsApp messages. It makes me wonder if WhatsApp is truly end to end encrypted as they claimed. How did they even single him out?
As a corollary question, if I were to pass Customs, and if I delete WhatsApp , Reddit etc just before I reach the counter, will they be able to find out that I just deleted the apps minutes ago? I’ll be deleting them from my phone but keep them on the cloud.
I agree with what other people are saying, the whole phone number requirement of Signal isn’t great since, for the most part phone numbers are intended to link to your real world identity. That means they are a very big weak link.
Also let us not forget that Signal is a centralized service run by one company. They have been very resistant in the past to the idea of decentralization and interoperability. I’m already very skeptical of people who claim to be a savior or hero of Privacy and security lie this, even more so when it’s a centralized service. You do know that WhatsApp started out like Signal did right? Look where they are now. You cannot trust a centralized service like Signal, especially one that forces you to provide real world identification. Signal can just as easily be sold and backdoored like WhatsApp was, decentralized services are much more resilient to that kind of thing.
Whatsapp was bought by Facebook and then one of the folks dumped their money into signal making it a self-funded org.