On Tuesday, Iranian state media called on viewers to uninstall WhatsApp from their phones, claiming that the messaging service collected user data and sent it to Israel.
WhatsApp stated in a statement that it was “alarmed that these untrue reports will be used as a justification to block our services at a time when people are most in need of them.” Because WhatsApp employs end-to-end encryption, a message cannot be read by a service provider in the middle.
It also stated, “We don’t keep track of who is messaging you, we don’t track your exact location, and we don’t track the private messages people are sending to each other.” “No government receives bulk information from us.”
End-to-end encryption means that messages are scrambled so that only the sender and recipient can see them. If anyone else intercepts the message, all they will see is a garble that can’t be unscrambled without the key.
Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University and cybersecurity expert, 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 centers 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 increasingly hard to trust the global network of data infrastructure,” he said.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, own WhatsApp.
Iran has blocked access to various social media platforms over the years but many people in the country use proxies and virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access them. It banned WhatsApp and Google Play in 2022 during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the country’s morality police. That ban was lifted late last year.
WhatsApp had been one of Iran’s most popular messaging apps besides Instagram and Telegram.
