Let’s face it: it’s almost impossible to imagine our lives nowadays without WhatsApp. The world’s most famous instant-messaging app is being used not only for entertainment purposes. Many users are doing various types of business through the app as well. The end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature offered by the app is surely very comforting for many.
But in the future, it might become dangerous to keep using WhatsApp. Surprisingly enough, the idea comes from Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer, as the New York Post reveals. What happens is that the EU plans to make WhatsApp allow its app to be interoperable, which means that the text messages will pass through different services. This obviously means that the long-praised end-to-end encryption (E2EE) will become pretty much useless.
“A privacy and security nightmare”
Alex Stamos declared for The Verge:
How do you tell your phone who you want to talk to, and how does the phone find that person?
There is no way to allow for end-to-end encryption without trusting every provider to handle the identity management… If the goal is for all of the messaging systems to treat each other’s users exactly the same, then this is a privacy and security nightmare.
The major concern seems to be surrounding only text messages, as there’s no apparent issue regarding video calls as well.
In the end, if WhatsApp users begin to feel unsafe when it comes to using the Facebook-owned app, it’s good to know that there are plenty of alternative apps out there. We can mention Skype, Zoom, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Chat (ex-Hangouts), Viber, and a lot more. All of these apps offer both instant text messaging and video calling.
However, it’s not risky to use WhatsApp at the moment, but it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on the latest news to see how the situation evolves.