SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
WhatsApp being a black box means we don’t know how it’s doing things but we can still know a lot about what it’s doing and what it’s not doing. For example we know it has permissions to access all the contacts and we know when it’s accessing device location data. We also know from FBI documents that they can’t access content of E2EE messages or how much data it’s transmitting and when. It would be hard for Meta to transmit all received messages to their servers without anyone noticing. It’s good you prefer OSS but it doesn’t mean you can make wild claims about some security flaws like that.