The conversation that changed everything
A few years ago, on a programming forum, someone asked whether the big messaging companies truly respected the privacy they promised. The conversation started half-jokingly, with comments about whether they really encrypted messages or read them on the inside. Until someone appeared who claimed to have worked at a major messaging company whose name I should not mention.
After several exchanges, someone asked the direct question. And the answer was surprising: yes, as far as he knew, the commitment to not reading message content was scrupulously respected. The code he had written, and that of his close colleagues, never touched the text of conversations.
But then he added something nobody expected: "We don't read the content of messages because we don't need to."
Why there's no need
He explained that trying to read and understand the content of millions of conversations is extraordinarily complex. People speak in dozens of languages, with dialects, family slang, made-up abbreviations, nicknames, double meanings. Processing all of that requires an enormous amount of memory, processors, and electricity. In short: money. A lot of money.
And most importantly: it's not worth it. Because the content of the message, he said, is nothing but smoke. Fog that confuses. The absolute truth lies in the metadata.
The example that explains everything
He gave an example. Imagine a man in a relationship. We know he's in a relationship because he posts about it on social media. We know they live together because the geolocation data from their phones matches: they sleep in the same place, dine in the same place, travel together on weekends. All this information is being continuously recorded by the phones, without anyone having to request it.
Now imagine this man's phone starts exchanging messages with a new phone. A phone that turns out to belong to a woman who is not his partner. In turn, this woman has her own partner, with whom she also lives — we know this from the same geolocation data.
The messages between them follow a pattern. They happen at specific times. Responses are almost instant — there's an active, intense conversation. It almost always coincides with moments when neither of them is near their actual partner. And frequently, each of them is alone — we know because there are no other phones from their close circle nearby.
And from time to time, with a periodicity that starts to become recognizable — a weekday afternoon, a Saturday morning — the two phones appear at the same geographic location. A secluded place. It could be a warehouse. It could be a summer apartment. It could be a small hotel on the outskirts.
Crystal clear.
Was any message read?
No. Not a single word. There was no need to decrypt anything, interpret anything, or process any text. Just metadata: who talks to whom, when, how often, where their phones are at that moment. Data that is not encrypted. Data that the server has by definition, because it needs it to function.
What is this information used for? To show you advertising. An ad for a nearby hotel that rents rooms by the hour. A getaway package to a spa for two. A deal at a discreet restaurant in the area. Not because someone read your messages. Because the metadata told your story better than your own words.
What this means
When an app tells you "your messages are end-to-end encrypted," it may be telling the truth. Nobody may be reading the text of your conversations. But if the server knows who you talk to, at what time, how often, and where you are when you do it, the encryption of the content is almost irrelevant. The metadata has already told them everything they need to know.
The only way to protect metadata is for the server not to have it. And the only way for the server not to have it is for messages not to pass through it. For them to go directly from one device to the other. No intermediary. No record. No one in the middle who can note down who spoke to whom and at what time.
Because true privacy is not that nobody reads what you say. It's that nobody knows you said it.