WhatsApp, instant messaging service with over 200-million active users in India, might not be in a secure state, claimed, with experts raising questions. “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 .
“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. What I found most worrisome is that WhatsApp’s group chat feature allows any group member to mine data like Cambridge Analytica, and what is worse, they reveal mobile numbers. So people can be harassed off the platform,” he said.
Wadhwa mentioned that the group chat feature of WhatsApp pull users to the greater threat than their postings on Facebook because of the availability of mobile phone numbers.
“WhatsApp users take the company at its word that ‘Privacy and Security is in our DNA’. It clearly isn’t. There are major design flaws in its chat features,” he alleged.
“A friend told me that he and his family had joined a group which became much larger over time and he worried that his children were being contacted by strangers because of what was discussed in that group,” Wadhwa said.
He expressed the concern that, WhatsApp is being two-faced but in the case of Facebook, it provides sensitive device information. To the authorities, it claims that to decrypt information not possible, he said.
Almost of the world’s population is playing with WhatApp for free – services that cost the company money for paying for its employees, plants and IPRs production, eminent New York-based attorney Ravi Batra claimed that, the money by gathering by user data and using it in conjunction with others including Facebook.
“Moreover, user agrees to dis-associate with any class action or group-based actions – which means that since most users will suffer a small monetary damage, the cost of seeking damages or vindication far exceeds the benefit of getting damages or vindication. Net result to user: it isn’t worth fighting WhatsApp,” Batra told .
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