How Private is Private Messaging?
How WhatsApp and similar apps work, and what it means for our privacy.
Over 100 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp every single day. That’s over 1.1 million messages per second. Not understanding how instant messaging apps facilitate this can lead to privacy worries; do they store all our messages? Can anybody else see what I’m sending?
Here’s a brief behind-the-scenes to put your mind at ease. Or to worry about it more, I don’t know how you’ll take this info.
How messages go from one device to another
This explanation will use WhatsApp as an example but the same logic would apply to other internet messaging services.
You open WhatsApp and you send a message to a friend. Your phone doesn’t actually transmit that message directly to your friend; it gets sent to WhatsApp’s servers. These servers are computers whose job is to receive messages from everybody and send them to the intended recipient.
WhatsApp acts as a post office. The server will verify your identity, then receive your message and store it until the recipient is online and can receive it. At that point, the server will send the message and the transaction is complete.
This is called Client-Server architecture. We are the clients, and a server sits in the middle for us all to communicate with.
So WhatsApp has all my messages?
All our messages pass through WhatsApp’s servers before being sent to the end destination. This means that they will exist on those devices briefly. WhatsApp claims that the messages are deleted from their servers once there is confirmation that the recipient has received the message. We can’t check whether this is completely true or not but in theory, our messages are only stored on our devices, and they temporarily sit on WhatsApp’s servers until they get delivered.
What happens if other people get their hands on a message I sent?
If a hacker were to get access to WhatsApp’s servers, they may be able to see our messages, but they wouldn’t be able to read them; before sending our message to the server, our devices translate them in a way that only the intended recipient can understand. This is called End-to-End Encryption.
This is like putting each message in a locked box before sending it, where only the intended recipient has the key. You will have a different key for each person you want to message, and they will only have a copy of the one for them. It protects users from privacy breaches in case anybody within WhatsApp or externally (such as hackers) were to somehow get those messages.
But wait, there’s a catch!
This End-to-End Encryption was written by the company, which means they can easily add “backdoors”; ways to bypass this encryption.
One example of why they’d do this is if the government demanded access for security. WhatsApp would have to set up its encryption in a way which can be bypassed when needed, which completely defeats its purpose and erodes trust.
There is no way of telling for sure if such systems are in place currently.
Why don’t we send messages directly to each other? Why do we need a middleman?
An alternative to this system is called Peer-to-Peer; you send a message to someone, and the message goes directly from your phone to theirs without passing through a server. No snooping, no backdoors. Yay privacy!
This tech has drawbacks. The main drawback is that it requires both users to be online at the same time. If either user is offline, no messages can be sent; I can’t send a message to somebody who is offline, then go offline myself and expect the message to be delivered when they go back online. This is because if I’m offline, there’s no server to send the message for me!
There are messaging applications which use such technology, such as Keet (my review of Keet is coming soon). With all the breaches of trust that tech giants have been committing, this tech is now rising in popularity.
Given these drawbacks, would you consider a peer-to-peer alternative to protect your privacy? Let me know in the comments.
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