In the latest podcast of Satoshi's Voices Telefónica's CDO, Chema Alonso, discussed, among other things, how cybersecurity is evolving, influenced by the latest advances in AI and robotics. But what happens when it concerns us directly, as in day-to-day conversations on WhatsApp?
Your chats on WhatsApp
These platforms declare themselves to be totally secure and private, they ensure that with end-to-end encryption everything that is sent is protected, but Chema Alonso differed from this. "If WhatsApp wanted to read your messages, it would," he explained. "The application that encrypts these messages is from the platform itself, so it could be accessed without problem." Alonso defended that "100% security does not exist, if someone believes that by using a platform with end-to-end encryption no one will be able to access their communications, that is not true." You can see the full interview here.
Security breaches in Meta
Mark Zuckerberg's giant is not insurmountable, since there are many security breaches that the platform has had. One of the most famous was the Facebook case of Cambridge Analytica. A scandal in which it was revealed that a political consulting company used personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent to create psychological profiles and target personalized political ads during the 2016 US presidential election.
The company obtained the data through a personality testing app that was downloaded on Facebook and that collected information, not only about the users who used it, but also about their Facebook friends, allowing for massive data collection without your consent
Another similar case involved WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. In 2021, the company was found to have used a misleading privacy policy to force users to agree to share their data with Facebook.
This allowed Facebook to collect information about WhatsApp users, including their phone number, location, contacts and usage data, raising concerns about user privacy. As a result, many users abandoned WhatsApp in favor of more secure and private messaging apps, such as Signal and Telegram.
