Meta - Whatsapp - Privacy

Recently, Telegram CEO and Founder Pavel Dhrov was arrested in France for indulging in criminal activity such as money laundering and other illegal activity in his telegram application. Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov in 2013. Telegram is the fastest growing competitor against popular social media messaging platform Whatsapp and is expected to reach one billion users by this year. It is the most downloaded social media app next only to WhatsApp and Snapchat.



Telegram is officially banned in Iran, China since telegram has been used by Pro democratic protesters and opposition to voice their opinion against authoritatuve and facist regime. The application had been used by democratic activist to voice thier opinion against Government in Thailand. Since then, telegram was banned in Thailand. Telegram has been used during Hong Kong protests to speak against the human rights violation of Chinese Communist Party. The platform specifically stays away from “politically motivated censorship”.

Telegram says that Durov “supports Telegram financially and ideologically”. Pavel Durov was born in Soviet Union in early 1980s and spent his childhood in Italy. After the collapse of Berlin wall, he again went to back Russia. There, he co-founded a Social networking company, called VK, with his friends which was very similar to facebook. Vk become so popular in Russia and by 2012, the company was valued 4 billion dollar. Meanwhile, it has become the largest Social network in Russia. During Pro-democratic protest in Ukraine, Russian Government wanted Durov to censor and remove opposition posts against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Durov told the Russian Government that it goes against freedom of expression and he wouldn't comply with the Government. 

Durov was given two choice either to censor pro-democratic posts or sell his stake in VK and leave Russia. He choose freedom over hypocrisy. He sold his stake and left Russia. He was forced to leave his own company because he didn't believe in censorship. Then, he came to UAE to start his own venture Telegram. Now, Durov is 120th richest person of the earth. Though, he doesn't own any yathch, islands or even a home. He says owning materials ties one's freedom down.


Telegram is an open source, end to end encryption platform that allows user to send more secure and private messages. Telegram has maintained a hands-off stance on moderation, positioning the app as privacy based tool. Unlike Telegram, WhatsApp is not open source, so there’s no way for security researchers to easily check whether there are backdoors in its code. Not only does WhatsApp not publish its code, they do the exact opposite: WhatsApp deliberately obfuscates their application's code to make sure no one is able to study them thoroughly. 

WhatsApp and its parent company Meta may even be required to implement backdoors – via secret processes such as FBI gag orders. It’s not easy to run a secure communication application from the US. Meta comprises of social media's such as Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook.

Security agencies use anti-terror efforts to justify planting backdoors. The problem is that such backdoors can also be used by criminals and authoritarian governments. No wonder dictators seem to love WhatsApp: its lack of security allows them to spy on their own people, so WhatsApp continues to be freely available in places like Russia or Iran, where Telegram is banned by the authorities.


Meta announced they implemented end-to-end encryption so that “no third party can access messages”. This coincided with an aggressive push for all of its users to back up their chats in the cloud. When making this push, WhatsApp didn’t tell its users that when backed up, messages are no longer protected by end-to-end encryption and can be accessed by hackers and law enforcement. Brilliant marketing, and some naive people are serving their time in jail as a result.

The data generated by WhatsApp users – logs describing who chats with whom and when – is leaked to all kinds of agencies in large volumes by WhatsApp’s parent company. 

In the age of censorship  censored and facism, it is the duty of every person to know the importance of privacy. The data that we generate on social media is used by Governments to manipulate the public perspective. This kind of attitude by government threatens the basis of democracy which is based on public perspective. Durov arrest is seen by political and freedom activist as an attack on root of democracy itself.

Meta (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram) Privacy issues,





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