WhatsApp and Meta AI bosses in fight with Elon Musk
Elon Musk has become locked in two separate fights with senior bosses at Meta.
The Twitter/X chief executive accused WhatsApp of being insecure and of exporting its user’s data every night. “Some people still think it is secure,” he wrote in a post.
That prompted a response from Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp.
“Many have said this already, but worth repeating: this is not correct,” he wrote on X.
“We take security seriously and that’s why we end-to-end encrypt your messages. They don’t get sent to us every night or exported to us.”
He did note that it was possible to backup messages to the cloud, but that those could be encrypted too.
Mr Musk’s language could have been intended to refer to the metadata of messages, such as who people are chatting with. Mr Cathcart did not address questions about that data specifically.
The X boss also faced criticism from Yann LeCunn, who heads Meta’s artificial intelligence work. He asked Mr Musk whether it is “really enjoyable to disseminate complete bullshit” in response to his tweet about WhatsApp.
Mr LeCunn has repeatedly criticised Mr Musk, in particular over his claims that AI is about to become more intelligent than humans and could therefore pose an existential risk.
Mr Musk has taken aim at other messaging platforms recently. Earlier this year he tweeted to suggest that Signal was also insecure, despite having previously supported the secure messaging app.
“There are known vulnerabilities with Signal that are not being addressed,” he wrote in a post. “Seems odd...”
The tweet received an array of responses including from X’s own Community Notes platform. A message appended to his post said that any vulnerabilities “could be enumerated” and that there are “none for current versions”.
