Privacy will still be a thorny issue as more of our data is captured by the various social media accounts we have today. For example: There has been an encryption debate the past two weeks where the US government and Apple have been having a feud over unlocking an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist. This debate has fueled how important encryption is to protecting our data that is stored in our phones or in the cloud with the various social networks.
All social networks have some sort of encryption in place to secure your data. WhatsApp is one such app where your texts are usually encrypted on both ends so that it is highly unlikely to intercept your chats. It seems the company wants to expand that encryption to voice calls thanks to a report by The Guardian. Voice calls are not the only feature that will receive the encryption treatment, also group messages will be given the security boost in the coming weeks.
Voice calls were rolled out on WhatsApp almost a year ago and it ushered the era of affordable VoIP calls to its rather large user base. This move to launch voice calling over the internet sure made the terrestrial telcos nervous since it had the ability to diminish their voice revenue and it caused WhatsApp to be temporarily banned in Brazil for example.
In addition, this move by WhatsApp will raise questions if voice calls on its platform are actually encrypted or what is the current level of encryption. However, it is a welcome move by the company to protect the data of its over a billion active users although this won’t be good news to law enforcement agencies from all over the world.
[…] WhatsApp announced the voice calling feature on the platform slightly over a year ago to much acclaim to users when its user base was at 700 million. That feature trickled down to its sister app, Messenger later on but ever since, it has been trying to keep up with it. They have improved it over time to add features like reduced data usage while on the call and important stuff like encrypting these voice calls. […]