Meanwhile their stock is up 30% since April. Either users don't care and will give up any privacy they have for a reasonably good "free" entertainment, or our Congress can do shit to the behemoth Facebook became.
> At least with WhatsApp they only have my Metadata...
Only until Facebook decides to weaken or eliminate its end-to-end encryption. It's surprising that feature has lasted this long, since it's so antithetical to Facebook's business model of slurping up every bit of personal data it can.
> e2e was delivered 2016, WhatsApp was acquired in 2014.
Both WhatsApp founders have left Facebook recently, and they were much more privacy focused than Zuckerberg and Sandberg. My understanding is they protected the WhatsApp team from the culture of the rest of Facebook, but now that they're gone I don't see that continuing in the same way.
They launched e2e encryption after acquisition. There is nothing which suggests it will be weakened. There is now e2e encryption in Messenger as well if you want to enable it.
> They won’t do that until they have a different app supporting E2E. Why would they voluntarily lose all E2E users to a competitor?
I would like to be optimistic, but the realist in me thinks the number of users for which end-to-end encryption is a vital feature is vanishingly small.
And maybe all FB needs to do to keep those users is to make end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp opt-in, so they can provide ~~"wonderful new features to you"~~ if you keep it off.
