Editor's ReviewWe don't currently recommend WhatsApp for secure communications! In particular, we're concerned about WhatsApp's August 2016 announcement of a new privacy policy that allows data sharing with parent company Facebook. This allows Facebook access to several pieces of WhatsApp users' information, including WhatsApp phone numbers and usage data.
Existing WhatsApp users at the time of the privacy policy switch had a grace period to change their settings and prevent Facebook from suggesting friends or serving ads based on WhatsApp data. New accounts, however, do not have the option to refuse these expanded uses of their data. Instead, the only option available to new users is whether to join WhatsApp at all under the new privacy policy and all of the data sharing it entails. Even though the company assures users it will not share their data directly with advertisers, this nevertheless presents a clear threat to users’ control of how their WhatsApp data is shared and used.
In addition we're concerned with WhatsApp's web app. WhatsApp provides an HTTPS-secured web interface for users to send and receive messages. However, as with all websites, the resources needed to load the application are delivered each and every time you visit that site. So, even if there is support for crypto in the browser, the web application can easily be modified to serve a malicious version of the application upon any given pageload, which is capable of delivering all your messages to a third party.
WhatsApp does still provide end-to-end encryption, which ensures that a message is turned into a secret message by its original sender, and decoded only by its final recipient. We take no issue with the way this encryption is performed. In fact, we hope that the encryption protocol WhatsApp uses, the Signal Protocol, becomes more widespread in the future. Instead, we are concerned about WhatsApp’s security despite the best efforts of the Signal Protocol.
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