In the summer of 2016, WhatsApp made an unprecedented change. The Facebook-owned company turned on end-to-end encryption by default for all of the billion-plus people using it—becoming, in the process, the world's largest encrypted messenger. Since then the number of people using it has swelled to more than 2 billion.
WIRED UK
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
The radical shift means that nobody at Facebook is able to read, or mine data from, the content of the messages you send. The only things that can access them are the two phones—acting as end points in the encryption setup—where the app is installed. For the encryption protecting your messages to be decoded, both devices must verify and exchange security codes as messages are transferred.
The encryption that WhatsApp uses was originally developed by Open Whisper Systems, the group behind encrypted messaging app rival Signal. Even though WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption does protect your communications—including files, images and calls—that doesn’t mean the service is as private as it could be by default. In fact, when it comes to WhatsApp versus Signal, we recommend the latter for people wanting the maximum security and privacy options.
However, with more than a third of the world using WhatsApp, its popularity is unrivaled, and ..
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