How safe is Whatsapp?

As per the official announcement in February 2020, WhatsApp serves over 2 Billion users making it one of the biggest and popular instant messaging apps. More than 65B messages are shared through this channel on a daily basis. It would not be wrong to presume it to be the second biggest social media platform after Facebook.

WhatsApp was founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton sold their messaging app to Facebook in 2014 for $19 Billion and joined the Board of Directors. But both of the co-founders of the app left the parent company i.e. Facebook just after 4 years of it being taken over. The reasons for such an action or step would have been considerably serious. There are multiple reasons as to why we all should reconsider using WhatsApp to share our personal details and sensitive data.

Facebook Criticism..

Facebook has been into a lot of news for wrong the reasons and one of them has been its practices and policies around data sharing and privacy of its users. If you are curious you can refer to the timeline of Facebook’s privacy issues by NBC news to understand that Facebook does not believe in keeping your data private. Very recently as well know Facebook was involved in one of the biggest data scandals.

Second is Facebook’s anti-competitive behavior. When Facebook looked to take over WhatsApp the European Union agreed to approve the deal if the contract assured to keep the data of both companies separate. It didn’t take long for Facebook to change its Privacy Policies in 2016 where it allowed the transfer of the data from WhatsApp to Facebook though the extent is still unknown but it surely included your mobile number and usage data.

Even WhatsApp’s co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook and tweeted #DeleteFacebook for a variety of reasons after leaving Facebook.

WhatsApp is not an open-source

If something is an open-source that means anyone can review the source code of the application and check if it performs as mentioned in the policies. To add on WhatsApp is not even compliant with GDPR policy.

To start with:

1) Anyone can add anybody to a WhatsApp group without their consent its a default setting ( you can change the same in the settings)

2) You are sharing your contact details and probably their data as well without they even known it.

You may want to look at WhatsApp’s privacy policy, a lot is going on there.

Whatsapp backups Aren’t Encrypted

Even though WhatsApp boasts to have end-end encryption, it just isn’t enough. It means that only yours and recipient’s mobile can decode the messages. This feature is good and prevents the data to be leaked to any other source.

But there’s a twist, your Whatsapp back up data on iCloud or google cloud isn’t safe. When you backup your data over the cloud, it is stored in a decrypted form that means it can be read by a source which you may not have given your consent to.

Post backup, you are at the mercy of cloud provider to have a strong security around the data. The challenge with a decrypted form of data is that it would require only a warrant from the government to get access to all the data.

A word of Caution

Even if you decide to continue with WhatsApp, if you have been sharing your credit card pictures with your spouse, or passwords with your team, or any other account credentials you must give it a thought again. In addition to this, if you are sharing personal photographs that you wouldn’t want anyone else to see then you better switch off the backup for your pictures.