Update

Let's start with WhatsApp. According to information shared by Pavel Durov, a class action lawsuit has recently been filed against Meta, WhatsApp, and consulting firm Accenture. The lawsuit alleges that there is a backdoor in WhatsApp's source code that allows Meta and third-party contractors to bypass encryption and read users' private messages. Although Meta has always claimed that its platform is 100% end-to-end encrypted and that no one except the sender and receiver can read messages, the facts of this case say otherwise. Accessing this huge amount of data without the users' consent completely contradicts the basic concept of encryption.

On the other hand, platforms like Signal, which cybersecurity experts consider the gold standard for privacy protection, are also now in the spotlight. In a recent Texas case, the FBI recovered deleted Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone. However, there is a big technical fact here. The FBI was unable to break Signal's own encryption. They essentially exploited Apple's or iOS's notification storage system.

If message previews are turned on on the iPhone's lock screen, the notification data remains in the system's internal memory even after deleting the app. And the FBI recovered incoming messages from there with the help of forensic tools. Durov took this opportunity to remind us that Signal relies on US companies, and Telegram's Secret Chat notifications never show message content, so they are much safer in this regard.

However, while Pavel Durov is bashing WhatsApp and Signal, it should not be forgotten that Telegram's default chat is not end-to-end encrypted (data is stored on their cloud servers). You have to manually turn on secret chats, which many people don't know or don't use. And what happened in the case of Signal is basically an OS level (iOS) vulnerability, not a weakness in the Signal app itself. If you get physical access to the device, it is possible to extract a lot of sensitive data from any operating system with sophisticated forensic tools.