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.
it’s still closed source, so we can’t make guarantees about WhatsApp conversation participants.
“We” can’t but Signal, who work on WhatApp’s source code, can: https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/
tldr: When contacts have verified each other, communication is secure.
If you think that Signal can’t be trusted, you should not use their client either.
signal may have given a fully vetted and correct implementation to whatsapp, but because its closed source we don’t know if it has changed, or if its really implemented on all conversations.
It changes the trust model of conversation participants.
To answer your query, if signal was closed source, I wouldn’t trust it either.
They were not “given” it. They are literally the contractor who worked on that: “Over the past year, we’ve been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients.” –https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I’m not an encryption developer. I can’t vet this for Signal’s own app either.
…and because its closed source, community cryptography developers and researchers can’t vet it for you either. That is the core issue, its not about trust.
It’s about capabilities that inform the threat model, and the exposure model.