According to the declassified internal FBI document I just linked, they do have access to the content of messages from what’s app, without any formal legal request.

The NY post is a poor source and completely unreliable.

Look, just… just use fire fox! Sure some sights aren’t optimized for it, but it’s a minor difference in performance from a chromium based browser.

And the more people use fire fox the more sights will have a reason to optimize for it.

Anything that is using chromium is still using something built by Google, and thus if Google tries to alter chromium to make ad blockers stop working, or some other asinine idea, there isn’t much a browser can do about it.

It’s not illegal because it is end to end encrypted when you send messages, but it’s not encrypted on your phone and they have access to that, not to mention, I imagine they have access to the keys used to encrypt the messages, so even if they backed it up encrypted they can still read the messages.

The point of implementing it is not to protect people from surveillance, but rather to make people think they’re protected so they’ll keep using the platform rather than moving to another service. Their actual claims about it amount to “If your on public Wi-Fi or something, people skimming that won’t be able to see your messages” which is absurd because they already couldn’t.

Admittedly, no law enforcement that they refuse to cooperate with will have access to the messages, but like, “law enforcement groups Facebook doesn’t cooperate with” is a very small list.

Facebook owns what’s app and they can read any message on the service, they’ve also been known to give logs and messages to law enforcement agencies at request without warrants.

So, they’re really easy to work with and relatively affordable, so great for prototyping, and acceptable for production if a company wants to get stuff out the door without getting a proper custom built solution that would be better in the long run.

When spin (electric scooter app rental company) pulled out of Seattle, they didn’t pick up a lot of the scooters there. People started pulling them apart when it was deemed they were legally abandoned, and it turned out they were all running on raspberry pi’s as their brains.

Ultimately it’s save money on the development side since it allows companies to use less experienced or specialized employees. It’s obviously expensive in the long term since a custom built system that only does what you need it to would cost less