Elon Musk: “Whatsapp is not secure at all”

Published 9 July 2024 at 18.18

Foreign. Elon Musk is once again sharply criticizing Whatsapp and its handling of personal data.

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On Saturday, Elon Musk received a user question on X about why receives advertising related to the content of Whatsapp conversations, despite alleged end-to-end­ encryption.

Musk replied briefly and concisely: “Whatsapp is not secure at all.”

It is not the first time Musk criticizes Whatsapp, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. Back in May, he pointed out that WhatsApp exports user data during the night that is used for targeted advertising, which means that “users become products rather than customers”.

Whatsapp's boss, Will Cathcart, defends the platform by repeating that the messages are end-to-end encrypted and not sent to or exported by Whatsapp. However, security researcher Tommy Mysk points out that while messages are encrypted, metadata used for targeted ads is not.

The ongoing conflict between Musk and Zuckerberg has intensified since Meta launched Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter, which further strained relations between the two tech moguls.