WhatsApp’s “End-to-end encryption by default” claim is a giant consumer fraud.

~95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers — not E2E-encrypted. Backup encryption is optional, and few people enable it — let alone use strong passwords.

Even if you encrypt your WhatsApp backups with a strong password, your messages still end up in unencrypted cloud backups — because 90%+ of the people you message haven’t done the same. Add the fact that WhatsApp stores and discloses who you chat with, and the picture is dire.

Apple and Google disclose backed-up WhatsApp messages to third parties thousands of times per year. Meanwhile, Telegram hasn’t disclosed a single byte of users’ messages in its entire 12+ year history