> We need your contacts to provide the service, but don’t share your contacts with Meta.
There are plenty of ways to make this statement 100% factual and still effectively leak the user's address book, at least in a form useful to Meta. It is true that Meta doesn't need your raw contacts, it just needs certain inferences made from them. WhatsApp can perfectly well make those inferences and only share those, with some trivially-reversed "anonymization" on top as an extra layer of obfuscation.
There are plenty of ways to make this statement 100% factual and still effectively leak the user's address book, at least in a form useful to Meta. It is true that Meta doesn't need your raw contacts, it just needs certain inferences made from them. WhatsApp can perfectly well make those inferences and only share those, with some trivially-reversed "anonymization" on top as an extra layer of obfuscation.