Any time they get asked questions like “Are my messages visible only to me?”, they answer with a very canned response like “Your messages are encrypted from end-to-end and can’t be read by anyone while in transit” … or words to that effect. I have never seen them state that no analytics or telemetry is happening on the unencrypted side by the client. Which has always bothered me.

Back at the start WhatsApp wasn’t free, although it was pretty cheap. Then Meta bought it and made it free. Some time after that, the founders left and started Signal.

The E2E encrypted protocol WhatsApp used to use was the Signal protocol. When the OG founders left and created Signal they revamped it, calling it the Signal V2 protocol. Whether WhatsApp still uses that original Signal protocol or not is probably not known to many people outside of Meta, but WhatsApp definitely used to be E2E encrypted prior to Meta’s purchase.

I deleted my WhatsApp account around the time Meta announced they were merging all of their messaging stuff together, e.g. Facebook Messenger, Instagram etc.