Serious question there.
Both are E2EE (at the difference that Signal don’t keep a lot of metadata for themsleves) so WhatsApp should also be a “problem” for Russian government, so why they don’t ban it too ?
I’d say it brings legitimacy to Signal. But I imagine it indicates that WhatsApp provides enough information to supplement the rest of their data collection to track necessary people.
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I’ll bring a different PoV in that these bans aren’t necessarily logical
For example, Element is banned in India but I think Schildichat isn’t India bans flagship client for the Matrix network
Or Indonesia banning duckduckgo because porn but not Bing
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Fair. The US government wants to ban TikTok, but the tech giants in the US still get to have their cake and eat it.
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I think it’s a mix of a too-big-to-ban situation and the possibility that Meta provides some information to assist the government with whatever requests they make.
WhatsApp and Telegram are the two primary communication apps in Russia. Banning either of them could lead to massive portions of the common folk and even government officials being cut off from vital communication networks. They don’t really have an alternative.
Telegram used to be banned before the developers “agreed to help with extremism investigations.” I could see Meta doing the same thing.
From the outside, though, it looks quite silly, as Meta was recognized as an extremist organization in Russia back in 2022. They’ve banned Instagram and other Meta-owned software, except for WhatsApp.
Besides, they’ve been successful in restricting access to matrix.org servers and SimpleX. So, perhaps WhatsApp is either not a concern at all or, at the very least, not the primary target.
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I think it really goes to show just how important that metadata is. Knowing who you are, who you talk to, when you talk to them, your location when you communicate, etc. gives WhatsApp and by extension the state a pretty good overview of whats going on even without message content.
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absolutely:
whatsapp was a valuable adquisition for Meta despite it message contents being E2EE, and metadata is why. Keep in mind, data is more difficult to analyze than metadata.
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I think you mean the opposite.
with Enough metadata obviously you can infer an action or individual or stuff like that. But the data being accessible? Much easier than metadata.
WhatsApp still might be banned this year.
Russia declared Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, an “extremist organization” in 2022.
WhatsApp is the only company’s service that has not yet been blocked in Russia. However, on Dec. 19, the app was added to the register of information distributors, which requires it to store user data and hand it over at the request of Russian law enforcement agencies.
“If the messenger fails to fulfill certain requirements and obligations, the probability of blocking may increase,” Sheykin said.
“The development of the situation with WhatsApp in Russia in 2025 will depend on the position of the messenger’s management on storing information about users and correspondence and providing it at the request of the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service),” Sheykin added.