this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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It depends on if you trust Meta. Generally speaking there is end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp, which means only you and the person you chat with can decrypt your messages / media (source). I believe there are some weak spots in group chats, mostly caused by users themselves. Not sure about the new Community function but I'd be careful with what I share there.
Some parties like Apple have decided to scan photos from your device for illegal material (edit: after backlash they dropped this for now, my bad). If using an app like WhatsApp I'd personally be aware that something like that might happen in the future as well. I'd not be surprised if some employees might (temporarily) be able to access more data than widely assumed, for debugging reasons in case of bugs.
Personally I take the risk for pragmatic reasons, but it doesn't hurt to be a bit cautious / aware.
iirc Microsoft is doing it, read of a case where a parent sent a picture of his son to the doctor via onedrove share and his entire account got suspended over it.
No they haven’t, they aren’t, and they never even discussed scanning your messages like that. There’s a communication safety feature available to enable in parental controls so that if a child’s phone locally recognizes (using machine learning) that they received or are about to send a nude photo, the receiving photo is blurred and they’re given information about making safe choices and then allowed to continue or not.
They discussed it (source) but the backlash was enough to kill the project for now. Instead, they implemented the "opt-in" system you are talking about.
They discussed something adjacent, not anything that would scan and disclose your encrypted messages.
Thanks for correcting me, you are right about the image scanning. Added an edit to my statement.