How Secure are Your Messaging Apps?
Everyone these days is asking, “How Secure Is My Messaging App?” After all, if everyone had access to our phones, this kind of thing wouldn’t even happen.
What would happen if you had a message to send, but your phone was lost or stolen? Would you still be able to get your message across?
The best way to answer that question is to look at what messaging apps have in common with smartphones.
For one thing, both use end-to-end encryption to keep information safe from prying eyes.
An end-to-end encryption program also has something else in common: it also has functions that operate quietly within the background to ensure that the program is always secure.
No matter how hard spyware and hackers try, there’s no such thing as 100% secure messaging.
There’s always a risk of someone snooping around on your phone, and even if you think you’re protected now, it doesn’t mean you can rest assured.
Facebook Messenger
How secure is your Facebook chat? Well, to put it simply, not very. End-to-end encryption is the only way you can truly ensure that your messages are kept private without Facebook compromising its own end-users’ security.
The problem is that most people use their Facebook account to log into different chat platforms.
This means that when you’re chatting on one of the many free chat platforms – like Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger or MSN – your information is vulnerable to anyone who knows the password and id.
Even though most platforms encrypt your data before sending it to Facebook, they won’t encrypt the chats themselves.
The good news is that there are ways around this. There are several mobile apps for messaging that use end-to-end encryption on both messages and chats.
Whatsapp, Facebook chat and MSN messenger are all good candidates.
WhatsApp Messenger
Whatsapp is probably the best for short messages (under a few minutes) and is simple to use with no complicated interface.
You don’t need a smartphone, because everything is delivered wirelessly over Bluetooth.
The major mobile messaging apps aren’t quite as secure. Most messaging apps have weak encryption, which can be easily deciphered by hackers.
Many messages sent through WhatsApp or Facebook are subject to what’s called “joke messages”.
This is when a hacker makes up a message in order to trip you up or just to annoy you.
These messages aren’t encrypted, so anyone with a bit of computer know-how can intercept them and read your messages.
On top of this, there’s another major issue. Mobile devices are not inherently secret.
They are openly accessible by anyone, as they are powered by the same technology that internet users and cell phone cameras use.
Your messages are visible to anyone who has access to a Wi-Fi network.
And if you use WhatsApp or any other “secret” messaging platform, anyone can read your text messages.
This means that every time you turn on your smartphone, you are essentially inviting someone into a secure, private, and very difficult to identify “chat room”.
It also means that you are opening yourself up to the same snooping and snatching as the average internet user, and even more so.
If you send a picture of your baby to a friend via Facebook, you are essentially granting them access to your private life.
If you send a picture of your junk food to a friend, you are opening yourself up to having that junk food eaten by someone else.
Fortunately, there is good news. There are some great new privacy and security-enhancing mobile messaging platforms that are being released in 2021.
Companies like Whispernet and QK Labs have created an amazingly secure system that combines the best of internet chat apps and the convenience of your mobile phone.
By combining chat and video services and allowing for encrypted peer to peer file sharing, users will be able to stay anonymous while making free calls and sharing files with complete confidence.
The biggest benefit of using these new platforms will be the increased security and privacy that users will experience.
These platforms will revolutionize the way we communicate, and hopefully, we can do it without worrying about our information falling into the wrong hands.
Conclusion
After reading this piece, you now know the answer to the main reason you clicked this article to read. I hope this article gave you all the best information needed.
