WhatsApp’s head, Will Cathcart, has publicly refuted claims made by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and X, that the messaging app exports user data every night. In a post on X, Cathcart stated that Musk’s allegation was simply incorrect. He emphasized that WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning they cannot be read by the company at all.
Yann LeCun, the artificial intelligence chief at Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, also joined the conversation. In a post on X, he criticized Musk’s claims, accusing him of making contradictory and unrealistic claims about artificial intelligence and spreading conspiracy theories on his own social media platform.
However, security researcher Tommy Mysk pointed out that while WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, user data is not only about messages. It also includes metadata such as user location, which contacts the user is communicating with, the patterns of when the user is online, etc. It is known that WhatsApp does share some metadata with other platforms Meta owns, but this does not include messages.
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