From the announcement that the platform would share data with parent company Meta, to the six-hour power outage in October which saw Telegram gain a record 70 million users,” Demetriades says.

“WhatsApp has faced its fair share of challenges this year. Messages are available from multiple devices, which while a convenience can also present security and privacy issues,” Hauk concluded.ĭemetriades goes on to talk about the issues that WhatsApp has encountered over the last year, like the backlash when it asked users to consent to share their data with Facebook, and how the apps under Meta collapsed for over seven hours back in October of last year. Users need to make sure that their backups are encrypted as they are not encrypted by default. The Meta-owned app may share some information back to the Facebook Mothership.

“WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption (although messages to businesses might not be end-to-end encrypted). The company also announced that its cloud chat backups would be end-to-end encrypted from last year.Ĭonsumer privacy champion at Pixel Privacy, Chris Hauk, also mentioned to Trusted Reviews the importance of end-to-end encryption regarding the safety of messaging apps. WhatsApp has offered end-to-end encryption for a long time, but it was only fully implemented in 2016. It introduced end-to-end encryption as a standard feature last year.” “Two billion people worldwide are using WhatsApp so it’s almost certain that people you want to message already have WhatsApp. What are the benefits and the drawbacks to WhatsApp over other messaging apps?ĭucan Brown, VP of Enterprise Research, told Trusted Reviews that one of the main benefits of WhatsApp is the sheer number of people already using the app. “However, while the app safely encrypts conversations, it doesn’t protect them from people taking and sharing screenshots of conversations and personal information,” Demetriades went on to say. Your information will only be shared with Meta if you are messaging a business, according to the company. “But the important thing to remember is that WhatsApp offers end-to-end encrypted messaging on everything sent in the app. Antony Demetriades, VP at McAfee, spoke to Trusted Reviews about how WhatsApp uses end-to-end encrypted messages on everything sent in the app to help protect users.

What is new in whatsapp