Recently, the popular social messaging app WhatsApp came under a lot of scrutiny, especially here in India. It is believed that extracting an individual’s personal information- which via the security route WhatsApp promises to conceal- can be retrieved quite easily. This was made possible when breaking news covered information about renowned Israeli company NSO providing help to break into one’s personal WhatsApp information.
In India, the development quite simply led to a furor because at the current moment, Facebook-owned popular social media messaging app has its biggest user market in the form of the country.
Therefore, the development that many social activists’, government workers and other valuable individuals placed at esteemed institutions were- to put it bluntly- spied on using WhatsApp put the entire country under a blanket of discomfort. From that point on a debate has raged: is WhatsApp even safe or not?
And recently, the comments made by Telegram founder on WhatsApp have only revived a discussion, which given the importance attributed to individual privacy, seems just and fair!
So what exactly were the comments made by the Telegram founder on WhatsApp and do they point in a positive direction? In fact, the gist of the comments made by Telegram Founder on WhatsApp points to a simple, one-directional plan of action.
Pavel Durov seems to have absolutely no hesitation in suggesting that if in case one doesn’t want his pictures or information to be disclosed, placed in the glaring public eye, then simply delete WhatsApp.
He clearly seems to have urged people to delete WhatsApp unless they are fine about having some sort of surveillance over their private lives.
He was also positive about the fact that WhatsApp can easily come under the spell of a Trojan Horse to spy on its users’ content, which includes images stored on their smartphones.
Forbes magazine covered the comments made by Telegram founder on WhatsApp, an event that quickly snowballed into major mainstream news published on divergent magazines and journals:
“Unless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day, you should delete WhatsApp from your phone,” as stated by Durov on his Telegram channel to his 335,000 followers, Forbes shared on Thursday.”
And that’s not all. He would further add the following: “Facebook has been part of surveillance programs long before it acquired WhatsApp. It is naive to think the company would change its policies after the acquisition, which has been made even more obvious by the WhatsApp founder’s admission regarding the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook: ‘I sold my users’ privacy’,” the Telegram founder added.
Now where it stands at the moment, there’s really not much of a surprise that in the aftermath of the widely-debated WhatsApp snooping row, many alert users seem to have gravitated toward Telegram. In reality, while WhatsApp enjoys a user base of no fewer than 1.6 billion people, Telegram, with 200 million users, is only continuing to build on its user base.
The report on Forbes suggested, ” Telegram, perhaps due to its size, is not subject to the same hacks and security breaches as WhatsApp. So it is no surprise that Durov would use the recent backdoor discoveries in WhatsApp as a means to go after his commercial and, in many ways, ideological rival.
Critics and Tech-experts who deal with social media on a regular basis have identified WhatsApp’s vulnerability as a serious severity.