Iranian state television urged people to uninstall WhatsApp from their smartphones, claiming without concrete evidence that the messaging app collects information about users to send to Israel.
In a statement to the Associated Press**, WhatsApp said it is “concerned that these false reports will be used as a pretext to block our services at a time when people need them most.”
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, which means that messages are encrypted so that only the sender and the recipient can see them. If someone else tries to access these messages, they will only see a distorted message that cannot be decrypted without a key.
“We don’t track your exact location, we don’t keep logs of who is messaging whom, and we don’t track the personal messages people send each other,” the statement said. “We do not provide large amounts of information to any government.”
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, the American parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The app has been one of the most popular messaging apps besides Instagram and Telegram.
This is not the first time Iran has asked people to limit their use of WhatsApp. In 2022, the country banned WhatsApp during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the morality police.
It is possible to understand unencrypted WhatsApp metadata
Cybersecurity expert Gregory Falco said that it has been demonstrated that it is possible to understand WhatsApp metadata that is not encrypted.
“So you can understand how people are using the app, and it’s been a consistent issue where people have not been interested in interacting with WhatsApp for that reason,” he said.
Another issue is data sovereignty, Falco added, where the data centers that store WhatsApp data from a particular country are not necessarily located in that country. For example, it is possible that WhatsApp data from Iran is not hosted in Iran.
“Countries should host their data domestically and process it domestically with their own algorithms. Because it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the global network of data infrastructure,” he said.
