Following Apple’s brush with the FBI over encryption, messaging app WhatsApp announced it will encrypt all messages sent through the service.
This means, like Apple, WhatsApp won’t have access to its roughly 1 billion users’ data, but neither will anyone else.
The company is taking privacy a step further by using what’s called end-to-end encryption. That basically means only the person receiving the call or message will be able to decipher it.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum wrote in a blog post: "The desire to protect people's private communication is one of the core beliefs we have at WhatsApp, and for me, it's personal. I grew up in the USSR during communist rule and the fact that people couldn't speak freely is one of the reasons my family moved to the United States."
The company did acknowledge the added layers of security could make criminal investigations more difficult but said it wasn’t willing to risk exposing its users to hackers or cybercriminals.
This video includes a clip from WhatsApp and images from Getty Images.
