One blunder involved using non-secret information to construct secret encryption keys, which is a bit like using your pet’s name as a login password.Īnother blunder involved the two-time use of a one-time pad – a cryptographic technique requiring, as its name suggests, that you never re-use its key material.Īnd Jan Koum, CEO of WhatsApp, went public recently to assert that “espect for your privacy is coded into our DNA,” even though little more than a year had passed since the company was censured by Canadian and Dutch privacy authorities for violating privacy rules in both countries. WhatsApp, indeed, has made various worrying privacy blunders in its brief history. History suggests, however, that such trust is misplaced. That sort of popularity and financial power means that WhatsApp handles a lot – an awful lot! – of personally identifiable information (PII) from and about its users, who in turn have to trust that the company does the right thing when it comes to guarding their privacy. So you’d imagine that an app of that sort might end up being fairly popular, but WhatsApp went way past that point, and was acquired recently by Facebook for an astonishing $19,000,000,000. If you’re hooked on SMSing, and you send 1000 messages a month at 10 cents each, that is, indeed, quite a selling point. WhatsApp, in case you aren’t a fan yourself, is an online instant messaging service for phones and tablets that has the primary selling point that it allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMSes. The starting point of this story is a public admission, by students in the UNH Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group, that they “think WhatsApp is a great application.” A group of budding security researchers at the University of New Haven (UNH) in Connecticut, USA, recently taught themselves a handy lesson about the difference between liking something and trusting it.

Is whatsapp safe for privacy