Your favourite tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, was recently on your your favourite podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience and shared how unauthorised people can still view your WhatsApp messages, despite encryption.
As you know, WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. How could you forget when the app reminds in every chat you start?
That little message may have given you a little too much peace of mind. It’s almost as if it says, “No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them.” Wait, that’s exactly what it says.
So, it’s not your fault, the message made it seem like WhatsApp was impenetrable. Well, it technically is but it’s also technically not. Let’s get into it.
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO) confirmed that U.S. authorities, including the CIA, can access WhatsApp messages through physical access to devices, despite the platform’s end-to-end encryption.
Although he spoke about U.S. authorities only, you better believe that authorities in other countries can do the same.
Zuckerberg explained that while encryption protects message content from Meta’s servers, it does not prevent law enforcement from accessing data directly on a user’s device.
He mentioned spyware tools like Pegasus, which can be secretly installed on phones, allowing authorities to access encrypted messages and other data without user knowledge.
We talked about Pegasus before and how various countries from all over the world used the Israeli-developed spyware to snoop on journalists and opposition politicians.
So, Zuckerberg was not telling us something new but rather reminding us that when nation states and law enforcement consider you important enough to snoop on, end-to-end encryption alone won’t save you.
Zuckerberg says if you’re likely to have the attention of these powerful organisations, disappearing messages are your friend.
The disappearing messages feature automatically delete message threads after a set period, reducing the risk of sensitive data exposure.
Zuckerberg says if the messages have disappeared then even when someone has spyware on your phone allow they won’t have much to see.
The principle being that if you reduce the amount of sensitive data stored on devices, you ensure that even if a phone is compromised, the messages will no longer be available to those who gain unauthorised access.
Said Zuck,
If someone has compromised your phone and they can see everything that’s going on there, then obviously they can see stuff as it comes in… So having it be encrypted and disappearing, I think is a pretty good kind of standard of security and privacy
Needless to say, you likely aren’t in danger of having this kind of spyware on your phone.
Unless you are a politician, a loud mouth journalist like Hopewell or other influential individual whose conversations governments would be interested in. You would know if you would be a target.
That means the rest of us can rest easy. Encryption keeps those inconsequential texts of ours safe.
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