By Euronews with AP
Published on •Updated
Iranian state television urged people to remove WhatsApp from their smartphones, alleging without specific evidence that the messaging app gathered user information to send to Israel.
In a statement to the Associated Press,** WhatsApp said it was “concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most.”
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, meaning messages are scrambled so that only the sender and recipient can see them. If someone else tries to access these messages all they will see is a distorted message that can’t be unscrambled without a key.
“We do not track your precise location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the personal messages people are sending one another,” the statement added. “We do not provide bulk information to any government”.
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, the US-based parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The app had been one of the most popular messaging apps aside from Instagram and Telegram.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Iran has asked people to limit their use of WhatsApp. In 2022, the country banned WhatsApp during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the country’s morality police.
Possible to understand unencrypted WhatsApp metadata
Cybersecurity expert Gregory Falco said it’s been demonstrated that it’s possible to understand metadata about WhatsApp that does not get encrypted.
“So you can understand things about how people are using the app and that’s been a consistent issue where people have not been interested in engaging with WhatsApp for that (reason),” he said.
Another issue is data sovereignty, Falco added, where data centres hosting WhatsApp data from a certain country are not necessarily located in that country. It’s more than feasible, for instance, that WhatsApp’s data from Iran is not hosted in Iran.
“Countries need to house their data in-country and process the data in-country with their own algorithms. Because it’s really hard increasingly to trust the global network of data infrastructure,” he said.
