Sorry to necropost, but I recently stumbled upon this interesting article from 6 months ago that I have not seen discussed on may privacy-related communities.
I quote from the article:
"According to the internal assessment, the stakes are high: 'Inspection and analysis of network traffic is completely invisible to us, yet it reveals the connections between our users: who is in a group together, who is messaging who, and (hardest to hide) who is calling who.'";
"The analysis notes that a government can easily tell when a person is using WhatsApp, in part because the data must pass through Meta’s readily identifiable corporate servers. A government agency can then unmask specific WhatsApp users by tracing their IP address";
"The internal warning notes that these attacks require all members of a WhatsApp group or both sides of a conversation to be on the same network and within the same country or 'treaty jurisdiction'";
"The assessment reveals WhatsApp has been aware of this threat since last year, and notes the same surveillance techniques work against other competing apps."
As quoted, this is not a vulnerability per se in ShitApp, but rather a threat model not considered by almost all messaging apps, since these metadata correlation attacks are always possible if the adversary controls a decent part of the network. That said, the only way this can be avoided is using cryptographic techniques like Signal's sealed sender and metadata minimisation techniques... which ShitApp is of course not using, since it's the champion of metadata generation and collection.
To quote from this other article:
"end-to-end encryption only protects against reading messages during their transit. End-to-end encryption is therefore a minimum requirement for a private messaging service [...] For them [Facebook/Meta], the value of a messaging service lies is in knowing the dynamics of the social network: who talks to whom? When? Where are the individuals when they send those messages? How frequently do they talk? Like no other, Meta knows the value of metadata; they changed their name for a reason. Meta knows all too well how to exploit and valorise this data, and mention this in their privacy policy"
So, for anyone still wondering, WhatsApp is not bad in terms of security; but that is hardly the whole picture, or even the appropriate question. Remember what former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden said in 2014: “we kill people based on metadata”.
Sadly, more than 2 billion normies in the world use WhatsApp; and normies do not (want to) understand or cannot understand why apps like this are bad for their privacy and, in turn, for all of our daily lives, let alone be convinced to use more private and secure messaging apps like Signal, SimpleX and Threema that do apply metadata minimisation and encryption techniques.
