[abcd_f]

I witnessed something recently that points unambiguously at Whatsapp chats being not private.

Not two months ago I sent a single photo to a friend of some random MacGyver kitchen contraption I made. Never described it, just a photo with the lol. He replied lol. He never reshared nor discussed it with anyone else. We never spoke about this before or after. Two days later he starts seeing ads on Facebook for a proper version of the same. There's virtually no other explanation except for Meta vacuuming and analyzing the photo. None.

[halapro]

Machines are really good at putting two and two together and humans are generally not. Are both of you completely sure that you didn't google anything related to the image before or after?

While Meta doesn't have access to the contents, they do know who you're texting and when.

[Hackbraten]

It takes more than two days to develop and roll out a new product. That goes for kitchen appliances, too.

[jokersarewild]

I don't think the claim was that the commercial device never existed but that it was too obscure for the friend to randomly independently get targeted ads about it..

But I don't think WhatsApp takes many steps to protect media and in many cases the user really wants to backup media or share in other apps, etc, over security for media.