Why Should Not We Consider WhatsApp a “No-Threat”?

By: Hamid Reza Naghashian

Do readers of this article know that WhatsApp messaging service is currently one of the most powerful social networks in the today’s world? This network today connects almost one billion people in the world and let them be aware of their condition and tastes. The creator and founder of this popular social network is a poor boy from a village in Kiev, Ukraine, who moved to the U.S. Instead of going to school, he joined Yahoo Co. and began learning programming. Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo Co. as infrastructure engineer. Coding in computing was a good business at that time but Koum was not after money and instead he was eager to flourish his talent and creativity. As a poor boy, he lived in a village in Kiev and he did not have even bread to eat. He worked as a sweeper in his village to earn his living and today the world bows down to him. But today money is still the only thing which is insignificant to him as he only thinks of scaling  the summit for creating a major link between all people in the world.

On the whole, Koum processes over 30 billion of messages which are exchanged by the users. Koum recently has announced that by the yearend, the number of WhatsApp messenger users will surpass one billion people.

Life story of this talented prodigy starts from a day in February 1976 when Jan was born to a poor family who were living in a small village in Kiev, Ukraine. Poverty was the main word and maybe the only word that Jan’s parents and family know it very well. But 16 years later, everything began to change.

In a cold and windy night in the winter and in a bleak house because of poverty, his father said that it was difficult to continue living in the village and decided to send his family to the U.S. to live but he himself decided to stay in the village to finish his job. After moving to California, the U.S. government gave them assistance to have an apartment to dwell and Jan, who was then only 16, began to work as a sweeper in a store. He later launched a food-staff booth in collaboration with his mother. They had hard times to earn their living. But five years after their presence in the U.S., Jan’s father died in Ukraine and his mother could not bear it and she died later. Their deaths put Jan under heavy psychological pressures.

In the high-school, Jan revealed his interest in computer networking and programming and later he enrolled in the university but he failed to finish his study and joined Yahoo Company. There he continued programming. In 2009, an idea stroke his mind and he decided to write a program which was later become famous and popular in the world. Koum named the app “WhatsApp” to sound like “what’s up” which is common among the people. And that app was the current WhatsApp messaging service which is used by millions of people which link and feed them with information and messages. The CEO of Facebook acquired Koum’s app services and company for $19 billion, turning him into an instant billionaire, worth an estimated $7.2 billion.

Today WhatsApp is one of the most advanced, fastest, comfortable and popular apps in the world which can get along with any language or taste in the world and we Iranians consider it as the safest place for our dialogues and exchanges of information or messages. But the question is: Is WhatsApp really a safe for us Iranians?

Recently after some allegations on questioning the safety and security of WhatsApp for its users, spokesman to the WhatsApp has told the Guardian daily, “In WhatsApp’s implementation of the Signal protocol, we have a ‘Show Security Notifications’ setting (option under Settings > Account > Security) that notifies you when a contact’s security code has changed. We know the most common reasons this happens are because someone has switched phones or reinstalled WhatsApp. This is because in many parts of the world, people frequently change devices and SIM cards. In these situations, we want to make sure people’s messages are delivered, not lost in transit.” He added, “Over one billion people use WhatsApp today because it is simple, fast, reliable and secure. At WhatsApp, we’ve always believed that people’s conversations should be secure and private. Last year, we gave all our users a better level of security by making every message, photo, video, file and call end-to-end encrypted by default. As we introduce features like end-to-end encryption, we focus on keeping the product simple and take into consideration how it’s used every day around the world.”

He reiterated that the company has implemented the signal protocol and it has added the option of show security notifications in its security section.

This option will help the users to get informed in case a stranger tries to intrude through changing the key. The way WhatsApp messaging service implemented the protocol, new keys are generated when – for example – a user gets a new phone or reinstalls the app.

Several factors may lead to change in the key as one can mention when the user is to change his SIM Card in the smart cellphone. The spokesman reiterated that the app does not want the messages are lost or missed when the user is changing the SIM Card. This is some sort of security which is taken into consideration by the experts. They believe there is essentially no social security in WhatsApp messaging service and information of users like in other apps or social networks can be passed to other and it is not wise to have fully trust on this app or any other apps in the social networks.