The OpenWhisper protocol, which is supposedly implemented by Messages and WhatsApp, was designed specifically to enable anonymous key agreement between the two or more parties sending messages, and no one else, including the service provider.
Whether or not Facebook actually implements it this way is a great question.
When you’re having a 1:1 conversation with someone at a party, and then crack a joke and some weird dude 10 feet away laughs at you and says “good one”.
The obvious answer here would be for meta to consider itself party to your conversation.
The point of end to end is to to ensure that only me and the person I'm sending a message to can read it and that none of the systems in-between us can read the plain text of it.
Uh nope, that's a huge move of the goal posts. The point of E2E is to ensure that nobody besides the two endpoints can read the messages, including all hops along the way, notably including the service provider themselves.
The problem is that this requires users to do things like use one device to authenticate another or restart key exchange with all of their peers. If a user loses their phone, then they will need to redo their security exchange process, which nobody wants to do or even understands. Thus companies often store key material in an insecure way to allow new devices to be silently added to the account.
Plus, even if E2E is well implemented, there are still problems when the endpoint software can be remotely updated to a version that exfiltrates keys or messages.
> The point of e2e is to block any third party to to see your conversations by sniffing packets. Not to stop Meta themselves.
No... the point of end to end encryption is to be encrypted end to end. Its literally the name. If meta can read your encrypted messages, that is just normal encryption not end to end encryption.
Although the frank meaning of "E2E encryption" is that a message is encrypted on the sender's device and only decrypted on the intended recipient's device, that is never ever what big tech companies mean when they use this term.
For one, this would remove companies' ability to support lawful interception, which puts them afoul of American law.
The point of e2e is to block any third party to to see your conversations by sniffing packets. Not to stop Meta themselves.