WhatsApp owner Facebook swears by the privacy it provides to its user. However, lately, we have come across many incidents where leak chats of influential personnel have surfaced on the internet.
WhatsApp chats are end-to-end encrypted. End-to-end encryption means that no one apart from the sender and receiver can read the messages, not even WhatsApp. So despite such stringent rules, how does every time there is a Bollywood scandal, the WhatsApp chats of the person involved are leaked and accessed?
The leak chat trend started after Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death when his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty, who was one of the main accused in his death case, found her chats being surfaced on the public domain. Post that, we saw Deepika Padukone heading to the NCB office over some leaked chats with a drug dealer. he latest case involves Bollywood actress Ananya Pandey, who was summoned by the NCB after her chats with Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, were allegedly revealed to the authorities.
These incidents leave users as well as netizens intrigued over WhatsApp’s privacy features.
WhatsApp has always stated that all its messages are end-to-end encrypted. In the given scenario, the messages can only be read by the sender and the receiver and no third person can gain access to them, not even WhatsApp and Facebook. WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption uses a Signal Protocol which keeps the third parties and WhatsApp itself from having access to messages or calls.
“WhatsApp has no ability to see the content of messages or listen to calls that are end-to-end encrypted. That’s because the encryption and decryption of messages sent and received on WhatsApp occur entirely on your device. Before a message ever leaves your device, it’s secured with a cryptographic lock, and only the recipient has the keys. In addition, the keys change with every single message that’s sent. While all of this happens behind the scenes, you can confirm your conversations are protected by checking the security verification code on your device,” WhatsApp’s FAQ page states.
Then how come even the most influential ones are not able to maintain their privacy? This is one question that needs to be answered.
