WhatsApp, instant mobile messaging platform now owned by Facebook will now incorporate a privacy encryption tool to protect messages from falling into the wrong hands as they navigate the internet.
Though a partnership with Open Whisper Systems, an open-source project focusing on security encryption services for mobile devices, the messaging platform will use the company’s TextSecure privacy protocol to scramble messages as they are sent and received.
According to Open Whisper, the TextSecure encryption tool has been enabled as a default setting and is already available in the recent version of WhatsApp for mobile devices running on Google’s Android operation system.
The encryption service is only available for individual messages at the moment, but is planned to roll out support for group chat and media messages at a later time in order to secure more platforms for clients.
Clients using WhatsApp on Android might also be required to provide a key verification in a later advancement as the protocol integrations continue to roll out.
“WhatsApp runs on an incredible number of mobile platforms so full deployment will be an incremental process as we add TextSecure protocol support into each WhatsApp client platform,” said Open Whisper Systems in a post.
If and when all mobile platforms get full support with the TextSecure protocol, users of WhatsApp should expect to get the end-to-end encryption by default on their platforms.
With Facebook being the new owners of WhatsApp and being that information on the social networking platform is ever hardly secure, allowing Facebook to get private information, this new announcement is likely to elicit a few security and trust concerns.
