Everything on WhatsApp is now encrypted, end-to-end, for all operating systems. That means engineers at the Facebook-owned chat app wouldn’t be able to read messages or watch video calls sent by its users even if ordered to do so by a court.
“WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you’re communicating with can read what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp,” according to an explanation on the app’s website. Wired was the first to report on the feature.
WhatsApp has a billion users, making it the world’s most popular chat app by some distance. End-to-end encryption is not an entirely new feature on the app: It’s been pushed to hundreds of millions of users on the Android mobile operating system since November 2014. But that rollout didn’t cover all types of messages, like group chats, videos, or photos. It also didn’t cover other operating systems, like Apple’s iOS or Windows Phone, although Android is the world’s most popular mobile OS.
WhatsApp’s latest encryption announcement is therefore just the final piece of a feature that the company has been working at for two years, in a way that renders it nearly invisible to its own users, as one of the cryptographers working on the project, Moxy Marlinspike, told Wired in 2014. “Now every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default if you and the people you message use the latest version of our app. Even your group chats and voice calls are encrypted,” WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum said in a Facebook post today (Apr. 5).
There are a handful of visible signs that encryption has kicked in. A text bubble now appears at the top of every new chat confirming that messages and calls are now end-to-end encrypted, if everyone participating in that conversation has the latest version of the app. Users also can manually verify that a chat is encrypted by scanning a unique QR code or comparing a 60-digit string of numbers that is generated for each chat.
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
The software engineers may not be able to read messages or watch video calls sent by its users even if ordered to do so by a court, but surely there is a way that the Vaad Harabbonim l’Taharas Hamachne can get in. Otherwise how are they to decide which schools our kids will be allowed into to etc etc?