It’s a complex solution to a longstanding issue, and one that sets a precedent for companies that don’t want to rely quite so extensively on the security of the world’s handful of dominant cloud providers .“We’ve been working on this problem for many years and to build this, we had to develop an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage that can be used across the world’s largest operating systems,” says WhatsApp product manager Calvin Pappas.

Mimoun, the founder of the digital security nonprofit Horizontal, asked the participants to list messaging platforms that they'd heard of or used, and they quickly rattled off Facebook Messenger , WhatsApp , Signal , and Telegram .

As part of that privacy policy refresh, WhatsApp also removed a passage about opting out of sharing certain data with Facebook: "If you are an existing user, you can choose not to have your WhatsApp account information shared with Facebook to improve your Facebook ads and products experiences.".

After the Instagram and WhatsApp founders left, Zuckerberg didn’t allow their successors to call themselves CEOs of those properties, a limitation that symbolized their bounded status.

The bipartisan coalition, led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, alleges that Facebook achieved its dominance through a years-long strategy of anticompetitive tactics, including its acquisitions of budding rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp. As it built up that dominant position, the suit argues, it began offering users a worse and worse privacy experience.

It has redesigned the Manage Storage page to show how much of your phone is being consumed by data stored in WhatsApp. it also highlights photos and videos that have been forwarded to you multiple times and the biggest files on your device.

Every chat will start with the feature off by default, and either party choosing to turn it on will trigger a set seven-day auto-delete window.

However, it’s worth stressing that the content of the messages you send isn’t shared, as Facebook doesn’t have access to them due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption .WhatsApp collects more information about you than it shares with Facebook.

If you’ve spent years sending private messages, videos and photos over WhatsApp on your iPhone, then you should think twice about switching to Android.

For the 2 billion of those people who also use the encrypted communication service WhatsApp, now more than ever is a time for calling, messaging, and seeking trustworthy information.Cathcart says WhatsApp's priority, even more so during the pandemic, is to elevate accurate information and support fact-checking organizations around the world.

Millican's presentation at the conference, in fact, wasn't about how Facebook plans to pull off the transition to default encryption for Messenger, which currently offers the feature only through its Secret Conversations mode .

In the early years co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton charged a $1 annual fee to use the service, but that didn’t stop WhatsApp from spreading, particularly in developing nations like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa.

Government Officials in More Than 20 Countries Targeted via WhatsApp HackingLast May, WhatsApp revealed that hackers at NSO Group had been exploiting a vulnerability in its software that allowed them to compromise a phone simply by targeting it with a voice call that planted malware on the device capable of silently stealing a victim's messages.

That's how long scientists allowed frozen sperm to be in microgravity as part of a study on what human reproduction would look like in space.If you were buying a new car, wouldn't you want to have the best features, safety, and value for your money?

Last year, the company began paying bounties for certain bugs researchers might find in third-party services that integrate with Facebook.“Reports submitted to us thanks to security researchers allow us to learn from their insights," says Dan Gurfinkel, who heads Facebook's bug bounty program.

Lily Hay Newman covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for WIRED.Silvanovich, who worked on the research with fellow Project Zero member Samuel Groß, got interested in interaction-less bugs because of a recent, dramatic WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed nation-state spies to compromise a phone just by calling it—even if the recipient didn’t answer the call.

Also, much as WhatsApp and Instagram employees and users might not like it, merging the three brands also allows Zuckerberg to say that he’s doing what the world is asking of him.

But a new Financial Times report alleges that the notorious Israeli spy firm NSO Group developed a WhatsApp exploit that could inject malware onto targeted phones—and steal data from them—simply by calling them.

Facebook’s last creative gasp was an effort called Creative Labs, which launched long-forgotten apps like Slingshot and Rooms, and was shuttered in 2015.Or consider the team I worked on while at Facebook, ads.

Alex Edelman/Alamy If there’s one choice that Facebook has made repeatedly over the past 15 years, it’s been to prioritize growth over privacy. The company’s loose policies on data collection over the years are also what allowed it to build one of the most successful advertising businesses in history.

Facebook Hires Up Three of Its Biggest Privacy Critics Nate Cardozo had been a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation before Facebook scooped him up, along with Access Now's Nathan White and OTI's Robyn Greene.

"If the goal is to allow cross-app traffic, and it’s not required to be encrypted, then what happens?" Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins University In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Thursday evening, Zuckerberg wrote that, "There’s no question that we collect some information for ads—but that information is generally important for security and operating our services as well." An indelible identity across Facebook's brands could have security benefits like enabling stronger anti-fraud protections.

New research shows that WhatsApp usage can exacerbate groupthink, sometimes mobilizing groups into acts of violence.Starting last spring, the platform began being linked to incidents of mob killings, most of which fit a similar pattern: People deemed to be “outsiders” were targeted by large mobs accusing them of being child kidnappers after rumors to be on the lookout circulated on WhatsApp. Some of these false rumors appeared in the form of highly convincing doctored bulletins from local police; others used the photos from Syria and manipulated videos.Killings occurred in May and June, but the high death toll in the Dhule incident marked a tipping point for the government.

Everyone you know is on the platform, and you can’t have social standing without being a user, as true for WhatsApp (outside the US) as it is for Facebook (inside the US).Smartphones as Extensions of Our BrainsThat’s made possible by another development for which WhatsApp’s timing was impeccable: the wiring of every human brain to a smartphone, and the endless reinforcement training—Pavlov’s dogs come to mind—that’s turned most of us into cognitive cyborgs, making the phone an extension of our brains.So even though WhatsApp is free of News Feed and ads, it contains the key functionality that reverts our brains to the heavily social and fragmented medium that predates the textual age of editors and encyclopedias.