Facebook can read your private WhatsApp conversations and snooping governments might be copping a look too
Privacy campaigners say the chilling revelations are a "huge threat to freedom of speech" and claim that governments might exploit it
YOUR WhatsApp messages aren't as private as you thought.
A vulnerability in how the popular messenger secures communications allows Facebook and other agencies to intercept everything you write, a chilling study has found.
Facebook - who owns WhatsApp - has previously said that nobody can intercept its billion-plus users' messages.
But a security researcher recently discovered that might not be the case, thanks to the way they are encrypted.
Tobias Boelter, a cryptography and security researcher at the University of Berkeley, spotted the flaw back in April 2016.
After alerting the social network he was told that there would be no further investigations and the backdoor still remains.
And there are fears government agencies could intercept your private chats too.
Boelter told : “If WhatsApp is asked by a government agency to disclose its messaging records, it can effectively grant access due to the change in keys.”
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A WhatsApp spokesperson said: "The Guardian posted a story this morning claiming that an intentional design decision in WhatsApp that prevents people from losing millions of messages is a “backdoor” allowing governments to force WhatsApp to decrypt message streams. This claim is false.
“WhatsApp does not give governments a “backdoor” into its systems and would fight any government request to create a backdoor. The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost, and WhatsApp offers people security notifications to alert them to potential security risks. WhatsApp published a technical white paper on its encryption design, and has been transparent about the government requests it receives, publishing data about those requests in the Facebook Government Requests Report."
“The Guardian posted a story this morning claiming that an intentional design decision in WhatsApp that prevents people from losing millions of messages is a “backdoor” allowing governments to force WhatsApp to decrypt message streams.** This claim is false.
“WhatsApp does not give governments a “backdoor” into its systems and would fight any government request to create a backdoor. The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost, and WhatsApp offers people security notifications to alert them to potential security risks. WhatsApp published a technical white paper on its encryption design, and has been transparent about the government requests it receives, publishing data about those requests in the Facebook Government Requests Report."
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