New Delhi: Growing public concern about government surveillance and foreign spying has driven more and more people towards encrypted messaging apps and self-destructing platforms in order to secure personal communication.
Debates on the right to privacy and data protection laws took a new turn in 2013 when former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden stole and exposed an extensive trove of electronic information that was allegedly intercepted from American citizens and foreign governments by the country.
Snowden’s whistleblowing had sparked a global need to secure communication and several messaging apps are attempting to give users just that. ThePrint takes a look at some of the most popular encrypted messaging apps.
One of WhatsApp’s primary features is its end-to-end encryption – which means only the sender and receiver can see a message. No intermediate party, not even WhatsApp, can read it.
The encryption feature was fully enforced in April 2016, seven years after the app was launched in California by Ukrainian American computer programmer Jan Koum and US internet entrepreneur Brian Acton.
The developers had earlier stated that WhatsApp has begun integrating end-to-end encryption in late 2014. But it was finally completed in 2016, around the time that FBI had asked Apple to help unlock a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone – who, in a December 2015 terrorist attack in California had killed 14 people and injured 22.
WhatsApp was officially acquired by Facebook in 2014.
Its encryption feature, however, doesn’t mean that law enforcement agencies won’t seek WhatsApp’s help in cracking cases. The developers had provided information about an ISIS recruiter before the encryption feature was enforced. Similarly, in May 2016, an Ohio court had requested the messaging app to track user numbers.
In India, the app had landed in hot water in 2018 when messages circulated via Whatsapp led to a spurt of lynchings. The Centre had then proposed legal reforms obliging app developers to help trace origin of messages, which WhatsApp had objected to saying it will break the encryption feature and user trust.
A major security breach was revealed in May when WhatsApp admitted to letting spyware collect information from phones via voice calls. The spyware is linked to Israeli cyberintelligence firm NSO Group, about which an Amnesty International official was quoted as saying: “NSO Group sells its products to governments who are known for outrageous human rights abuses…”
WhatsApp admitted that “dozens” of users with older versions of WhatsApp may have been affected and urged people to upgrade to its latest version.
According to reports, there are over a billion WhatsApp users globally with more than 400 million in India alone.
Also read: WhatsApp hack reveals an uncomfortable truth about encryption
Telegram
Telegram was launched in 2013 by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, also the founders of Moscow’s most popular social networking site VK.
It has over 200 million active users globally and benefits whenever Facebook-owned apps – including WhatsApp – experience technical glitch. In March, Telegram added 3 million users in 24 hours when Facebook Inc. faced a downtime. Co-founder and CEO Pavel had reacted saying: “Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”
In 2018, when Facebook was implicated for massive data breach involving Cambridge Analytica, Telegram looked like a champion of security when it refused to collaborate with the Russian government to divulge user data. Moscow retaliated by blocking the app.
Iran too has banned Telegram citing that it helps “armed uprisings”.
Some of its safety features include end-to-end encrypted ‘secret chats’ – allowing messages to self-destruct after a specified time – and not enabling message forwards. Also, secret chat messages aren’t stored on Telegram’s cloud servers but on the “devices of origin”.
These security features have also made Telegram the preferred app for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. People have organised themselves using the messaging app, preventing mainland Chinese and Hong Kong authorities from discovering their identities.
Snowden, however, has warned that Telegram’s method of storing messages – not sent from the ‘secret chat’ feature – to be vulnerable. The app is also said to be used widely by terror groups such as ISIS to broadcast information and raise funds via cryptocurrency.
Signal
Signal is called the “gold standard” among encrypted chat apps because its software coding is ‘open source’ – meaning any one can inspect the code to verify how secure the app is.
Many in the political circles use this app. Several aides of US President Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton use Signal. There are no official figures but according to Google Play store, Signal has been installed over 10 million times.
Since 2018, the app has been financially sustained by a non-profit organisation that WhatsApp co-founder Acton had helped create. The California-headquartered app was launched in 2014 by Open Whisper Systems, a collaborative software development project to which engineers are said to voluntarily contribute their efforts.
Both Signal and WhatsApp uses the same encryption protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems.
In 2017, Signal had registered the largest user growth compared to Telegram and WhatsApp, especially in “corrupt countries” such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Kenya and Russia.
Signal too has had to share information with law authorities. In October 2016, the developers said that a federal grand jury investigation had sought a Signal user’s information. The developers had said that only limited information such as “date and time a user registered with Signal and the last date of a user’s connectivity to the Signal service” was provided.
Egypt and Iran have banned Signal in the past to curb civilian uprisings.
Self-destructing messaging apps
Self-destructing or self-deleting messages is the latest feature that apps have been introducing to take privacy a step further.
One such is Snapchat that was launched in 2011. Messages in Snapchat get deleted 10 seconds after it is accessed. The US military has also been exploring technologies where messages can self-destruct.
Some of the other apps which has this feature are Wickr, BurnChat, StealthChat, and Kaboom.
Also read: Facebook’s new ‘privacy cop’ is set up for failure