WhatsApp announced Tuesday that messages sent over the service are only stored in a meaningless hash on WhatsApp servers by default. The update took a year and a half to roll out, and affects the messaging service\u2019s billion users.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
The announcement from the company, which is a subsidiary of Facebook, comes amid something of cold war between Silicon Valley and the US government on matters of encryption and privacy.<\/p>\n The highest-profile instance of this faceoff happened between Apple and the FBI, where the government initiated a legal battle to force the company to open an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. The litigation abruptly ended last month because the FBI managed to break into the phone using an unknown method without Apple\u2019s help.<\/p>\n While the timing may seem perfect in the wake of that controversy, WhatsApp has been in the process of strengthening privacy since November 2014, when it partnered with Open Whisper Systems to implement the nonprofit\u2019s encryption protocols.<\/p>\n \u201cThe desire to protect people\u2019s private communication is one of the core beliefs we have at WhatsApp, and for me, it\u2019s personal,\u201d<\/em> Ukrainian-born WhatsApp founder Jan Koum\u00a0wrote<\/a> in a Tuesday blog post. \u201cI grew up in the USSR during communist rule and the fact that people couldn\u2019t speak freely is one of the reasons my family moved to the United States.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The new privacy standards could affect the messenger\u2019s one billion users, but the end-to-end encryption is reliant on all communicants being upgraded to the software\u2019s latest version. The WhatsApp client will notify users as to whether or not their messages are fully encrypted.<\/p>\n While the company\u2019s blog post calls encryption \u201cone of the most important tools governments, companies, and individuals have to promote safety and security in the new digital age,\u201d<\/em> many in the US government have sought to undermine encryption on the basis of national security concerns. WhatsApp has been in the crosshairs of authorities before, and in March the service\u2019s messaging encryption thwarted a court-approved wiretap.<\/p>\n READ MORE: ISIS using Android app to send encrypted messages, plan attacks<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n On Monday, Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that he would soon unveil legislation that would regulate encrypted communications. In July, FBI Director Jim Comey pushed for the tech industry to create \u201cbackdoor\u201d keys to bypass encrypted software.<\/p>\n In their blog post, WhatsApp\u2019s founders gestured at the government\u2019s enmity with encryption, assuring users that \u201cno one can see inside the message.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNot cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us,\u201d<\/em> the blog post reads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Messaging giant WhatsApp completed its effort to fully encrypt every message and call made over its application. This means that even if WhatsApp wanted to, employees wouldn\u2019t be able to peer into users\u2019 messages or hand them over to snooping authorities. WhatsApp announced Tuesday that messages sent over the service are only stored in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-236174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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