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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

You've got me angrily reading the article while asking myself if WatsApp would be stupid enough to lose that mostly won case. (It's in our supreme court, I hope they will announce it illegal to widely block a communication channel and to coerce companies into releasing broken crypto.)

No, WatsApp didn't get informed of what URL you entered on the message. The site owner gets a notice, as does the user's ISP, and a lot of people in between. But WatsApp can not tell what URL was typed.

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WhatsApp is probably the last entity that I would be worried about reading my message. WhatsApp is trying to sell you a promise where nobody, other than the recipient, can know the content of your messages. Having the owner of a site whose URL is included in a WhatsApp message in real time as it is compose breaks that promise - now the site owner and many more people (DNS server operators, both ISPs at the very least) have information about the content of that message.

Yeah but tbh, its still not e2e encrypted. It just means WhatsApp is ignorant.

So they are in the clear legally, but morally, its still dubious to do that given its effectively disclosing what is often a substantial portion of the conversation.

The message contents are e2e encrypted.

And, transmitting an URL usually has no use beyond accessing it. They are doing what the user expects, it's just lacking some communication and power-user tools to override the default behavior.

I'm not sure that's what a user would expect; if anything, I'd think users would expect the opposite, that internet requests potentially with identifying information are not being sent to third parties based on what they've typed into the box without hitting send.

The system is clearly passing message data, not metadata, back to the app servers in the clear. Full stop.

> And, transmitting an URL usually has no use beyond accessing it. They are doing what the user expects, it's just lacking some communication and power-user tools to override the default behavior.

Let us just say there are certain things that can cause legal complications merely accessing it and not reporting it is technically still a crime.

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