How secure is the data we splurge on WhatsApp? Third parties can get hold of your number, and research reveals chinks in the protection of public group chats.
We are all on WhatsApp. We send our ATM PINs to our children, bank passwords to our husbands, property papers to brokers, PAN cards to our CAs, front and back of our passports as proof of residence to get gas connections, personal photos and videos to our family group, business strategies and marketing plans to our office groups, dirty jokes to college buddies. Intelligence agencies, police departments and military personnel are known to be interacting on this messenger service. Practically, our whole lives, warts and all, are on WhatsApp.
What if all this can be spied on? It’s our entire life history, after all, that’s out there. How safe is it on WhatsApp? Have you ever imagined your bank opening your locker and selling off your valuables? Can information be commodified and sold to interested marketers or political parties? Of course it can. It’s already happening across the board. Will WhatsApp do it?
Well, Facebook already stands exposed. In the biggest ‘breach’ on the internet since Edward Snowden snooped in on the all-snooping NSA in the US, Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed that his former firm Cambridge Analytica used data from 87 million Facebook accounts—including that of its top boss Mark Zuckerberg, as he made clear when he deposed to the US senate—to target them with campaign material prior to the country’s 2016 presidential election. Over 5 million Indians were also affected by the breach, courtesy of a Facebook app titled ‘This Is Your Digital Life’.
So, what’s the safeguard that the Facebook-owned WhatsApp won’t do the same? The messenger service is already prone to its own leaks, and data firm Statista estimates that WhatsApp had close to 200 million active users from India in Feburary 2017, a number Zuckerberg also confirms. This is a tenfold increase from 2013 when it started to become popular in India.
This story is from the May 14, 2018 edition of Outlook.
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This story is from the May 14, 2018 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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