WhatsApp text messages are at risk

A former director of Facebook has warned WhatsApp users of expected changes in privacy and security, as the European Union seeks to balance smaller and larger applications, which will cause several problems.

Under the proposals, WhatsApp and other messaging applications will be forced to make their applications interoperable, which means that texts can be sent between different services, and to make this possible, the end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp must open the gates to less secure competitors, according to the newspaper “The Sun » British.

Security experts said that the encryption that keeps texts safe from hackers and prying eyes, will be difficult to maintain between applications, and will have to be weakened or removed.

“There is no way to allow end-to-end encryption without trusting every provider to handle identity management, and if the goal is for all messaging systems to deal with each other’s users,” Okaz quoted the newspaper as saying. This is a privacy disaster and a major security nightmare.”

"I have a lot of concerns about whether this will break or severely undermine privacy, whether it will break a lot of the safety work we've done that we're particularly proud of, and whether it will actually lead to more innovation and competitiveness," he said. ».

Alex Stamos warns that “WhatsApp” blocks millions of accounts every month in an attempt to undermine spam and eliminate hackers, but other applications may not be effective in this, adding: “We have seen a lot of applications that come out and market themselves as bulk messages on WhatsApp. ».