Washington: Amid the reports of Whatsapp keeping an eye over the messages, the Facebook-owned company has refuted all such claims by saying that it collects very little data and every message is encrypted end-to-end. The messaging platform had on April 5, 2016 announced that it has finished adding end-to-end encryption to “every form of communication” on WhatsApp.
As some experts raised some doubts and concerns over the 200-million active Whatsapp users in India and thought that it not might be as secure as it is claimed to be. They even raised questions against Whatsapp for certain provisions of the user agreement wherein many of its wrongdoings would go un-challenged.
Responding to these questions, the company said that it collects very little data and every message is end-to-end encrypted which is somewhat contrary to comments in the media. The company also said that we are not keeping track of the friends and family you have messaged, a WhatsApp spokesperson told News Agencies.
“The privacy and security of our users is incredibly important to WhatsApp. Invite links are an optional feature available to group administrators to be used only with trusted individuals”, the spokesperson told News Agencies in response to a question.
The most popular messaging platform in the world, which was bought by the Social Network giant Facebook in 2014, has presently one billion users around the globe and is one of the most popular mediums of instant messaging in India.
After the recent scandal of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Whatsapp was heavily criticized by the critics.
“One-to-one communication between users are encrypted and may be as secure as WhatsApp claims. But the metadata, information about the calls, is likely being mined by the company,” Vivek Wadhwa, a top American technology entrepreneur and academic, told news agencies a day earlier.
“WhatsApp has admitted that it is sharing information about identity and device information with Facebook, allowing it to do the dirty work in snooping on users”, he said.
The claims from Mr Wadhwa is that the group chat feature of WhatApp can prove to be a bigger threat than their postings on Facebook because it avails other users to see mobile numbers.
As of now nearly one-quarter or more of the world’s population is using WhatsApp for free, New York-based attorney Ravi Batra said that it can make more money by harvesting user data and using it in parallel with others which can include Facebook.
He went on to comment further, “There is an old saying: There is no free lunch. Yet, there is a new brave digital world – that is free to use, and the costs and profit of providing the free services must come from ‘mining’ the habits and data connected to each user.”
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