Didn't they work with the Signal team for their e2e encryption of messages and calls? Are you saying that they've removed that despite showing the opposite at the beginning of of every new conversation?
The nuance here lies in what a "message" is. In the contemporary era of smartphones, data transmission, and all the bits-and-bobs in between, a message is much more than just the word contents. The "messages" might be e2e encrypted but the metadata is not, and that subtle difference is ridiculously important. e2e encryption is used as an indicator that your communication is private, but while the messages on whatsapp may be private (well, until your partner in the discussion decides to send a copy to meta themselves), the communication is anything but. For some reason though this nuance is set to the side and we all bicker about the message contents.
The reality is, sending information is a multi-layered thing. There's the message contents, the message metadata, and the network that the message is sent on. All of which are subjected to different levels of privacy. Each of those things can be used to spy on you, to abuse your rights, and to generally invade your life in ways that most would consider to be inappropriate. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that e2e encryption of the messages is only a portion of the issue. By using WhatsApp, you're trusting Meta corp as arbiter of all of these pieces and their implementations. Which is obviously, given everything the Zuck has ever leaked from his mouth piece, is not a great choice.
I know this, you know this, and it's abhorrent. I wanted to skip over that detail and point at the more glaring issues with trusting them in general. The real point is that trusting Meta to be a good moderator of your communication and all the ways that can be misused is really absurd. Emphasized by your point that they can automagically escape their encryption routines on a whim.
Neither of those says that anybody other than sender and recipient can access message contents. Just metadata, which is well understood (and from what I know, also true for Signal, correct me if I'm wrong).
The subpoena asks for "all correspondence with [these] users". I am not a lawyer, so I don't know if that gave enough wiggle room for Signal to not provide metadata, or if they don't store it in the first place.
Where does it say that? It says they could do that, not that they are doing it.
Although nothing indicates that Facebook currently collects user messages without manual intervention by the recipient, it's worth pointing out that there is no technical reason it could not do so. [...] An "end-to-end" encrypted messaging platform could choose to, for example, perform automated AI-based content scanning of all messages on a device, then forward automatically flagged messages to the platform's cloud for further action.
Didn't they work with the Signal team for their e2e encryption of messages and calls? Are you saying that they've removed that despite showing the opposite at the beginning of of every new conversation?