Huma Siraj
On Tuesday afternoon, Iranian state media urged citizens to remove WhatsApp from their phones, alleging without offering any solid evidence that the messaging app was collecting user data and transmitting it to Israel.
WhatsApp expressed its fear in a statement that these untrue accusations would be used as a justification to stop its services when users most need them. Because WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, messages are scrambled in a way that prevents anyone including the service provider from reading them while they’re in transit.
It also said, “We don’t monitor who you’re messaging, we don’t track your exact location, and we don’t read the private messages people send to one another.” “No government receives bulk information from us.”
When messages are protected with end-to-end encryption, they’re scrambled in a way that only the sender and the recipient can read them. Anyone who tries to intercept the message will only see a meaningless jumble of characters, unless they have the special key needed to decode it.
Gregory Falco, a Cybersecurity expert and assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University, noted that it is possible to access WhatsApp metadata, which is not protected by encryption.
“There’s been an ongoing concern that’s made some people hesitant to use WhatsApp for that reason,” he said. “It allows you to gain insights into how people are using the app.”
Falco pointed out that WhatsApp’s data centers aren’t always located in the same country as the users, which raises concerns about data sovereignty. For instance, it’s very likely that data from Iranian users isn’t stored within Iran’s borders.
“Countries need to store and manage their data within their own borders, using their own systems,” he said. “That’s because it’s becoming increasingly hard to trust the global data infrastructure.” WhatsApp is owned by Meta Platforms.
Iran has restricted access to many social media platforms for a long time, but people there often use VPNs and proxies to get around the bans. The Iranian government responded to widespread protests in 2022 over the death of a lady who had been arrested by the morality police by blocking access to Google Play and WhatsApp. That ban was lifted later the same year.
WhatsApp is owned by Meta Platforms, the same company that owns Facebook and Instagram.
