How Private Are Your WhatsApp Chats?

Everything you need to know about how your messages can be tapped, cloned or hacked and what you can do to protect yourself

- Kaushik Deka

As a private chat forum, WhatsApp has no equal—not in India, not in the world. Globally, the American freeware, cross-platform messaging service, owned by Facebook, boasts 2 billion users across 180 countries. With an estimated 65 billion messages being transmitted daily apart from 2 billion minutes of voice and video calls being made every day in 2018, it is undoubtedly the world’s most popular messaging service. In India, its user base of 400 million makes the country WhatsApp’s largest market. Besides being free, WhatsApp is simple to use, allows one to send text, audio and video messages and documents. But, most of all, it promises privacy and secrecy of communication, assuring every user that “messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted. No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them”.

This reputation of confidentiality that the messaging service enjoyed has now come under a cloud in India. Serious concerns are being raised about WhatsApp’s ability to protect a person’s privacy apart from preventing content from being transmitted and stored on its service from unauthorised access and misuse. Ironically, the erosion of trust began with a series of unrelated recent incidents. It started when Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput died in Mumbai on June 14 under mysterious circumstances. Agencies investigating Sushant’s death began to selectively leak WhatsApp conversations to media initially to debunk claims by suspects, including Sushant’s ex-girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty. In one instance, Chakraborty’s conversations with filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt were used to show that she left Rajput and not he who asked her to leave.