Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, recently lashed out at WhatsApp, calling the service, owned by Meta, a “surveillance tool.”
Durov warned WhatsApp’s users to steer clear of the app on Thursday, citing a vulnerability that WhatsApp exposed in September. He stated that WhatsApp was putting users’ information at risk and that company has been monitoring their activities for the previous 13 years.
“Hackers could have full access to everything on the phones of WhatsApp users.” Also, he said that WhatsApp’s security problems are deliberately planned.
“Every year we learn about some issue in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users’ devices at risk… It doesn’t matter if you are the richest person on Earth – if you have WhatsApp installed on your phone, all your data from every app on your device is accessible,” he also said.
According to Durov’s statements from a year ago, the new WhatsApp conditions require users to share all of their private information with Facebook. He vowed that he would not try to get anyone to use Telegram at this time.
“With over 700 million active users and more than 2 million daily signups, Telegram doesn’t need additional promotion. You can use any messaging app you like, but stay away from WhatsApp — it has now been a surveillance tool for 13 years,” he said.
Durov said in 2020 that WhatsApp’s security was not what it looked like.
Durov wrote a blog post titled “Why using WhatsApp is dangerous,” in which he said WhatsApp promoted end-to-end encryption as though it were a special effect that made all messages secure by default.
“However, this technology is not a silver bullet that can guarantee absolute privacy by itself,” he added.
Durov said that the ‘Secret Chats’ feature of Telegram was far more secure than other similar services.
“Don’t let yourself be fooled by the tech equivalent of circus magicians who’d like to focus your attention on one isolated aspect, all while performing their tricks elsewhere. They want you to think about end-to-end encryption as the only thing you have to look at for privacy. The reality is much more complicated,” the executive added.
