Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
For example when looking for an apartment I told my agent (non business account) that I wanted safety catches on the windows. I immediately got advertising for safety catches and window gates.
I don’t own cats but in a conversation with a friend who owns cats I said she should get one of those cat tree things and scratch poles. Right away Facebook starts showing me adverts for cat toys.
This is not stuff I’ve searched or googled or anything. Just mentioned in WhatsApp. Maybe WhatsApp whats differently in America but in Singapore I get advertising in Facebook from conversations.
Unless WhatsApp is audited completely, not just looking at some source code but also how all information passes through facebook and back to a receiver. Then we can only assume the e2ee is just marketing fluff and not something that is done in favour of privacy.
At best it’s circumstantial anecdotes pointing to Facebook extracting topic metadata out of your convos. This can be done clientside, no decryption necessary. (And it’s easy to prove that it’s being done if that’s the case)