Still Using WhatsApp? Change These Privacy Settings ASAP By Shannon Morse

Hey s'mores I'm Shannon Morris, welcome to Morse code. I do tech reviews and tutorials. So if you are looking for in-depth tech and gadget content, you have come to the right place. Might I ask WTF is all this madness about WhatsApp, and why did everybody come to signal so a couple of weeks ago they had published a new privacy policy via a notification to users tldr too long didn't read. It says that they reserve the right to collect and share data such as phone numbers, IP addresses and payments made through the app but also Facebook's other apps, like Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Now, communications with businesses made through WhatsApp can also be used to target them with ads on Facebook, too.

Then the notification said if a user did not agree, they would be locked out of their account on February 8th, so the people were pissed, though WhatsApp did come out with clarification, saying that they cannot share or see data from chats with your friends and family, but the new policy is for those business interactions, since Facebook bought WhatsApp way back in 2014 and Facebook has tons of their own scrutiny. For their data practices, people are not quick to trust, web sap and rightfully so now, WhatsApp chose to delay those privacy updates from February 8th to May 15th, though in response to all of that backlash. So what is the deal really? What is the information that WhatsApp actually collects from a user? How secure is their platform for chats? Hopefully, this video will break down the security and the privacy of WhatsApp so that we can get a general understanding of the company and what they collect about their users. Now before I get started, I did want to thank this episode. Sponsor the innovation program.

They have graduates who have worked with the program to develop their concepts into real world technology. So I'm going to be featuring several innovators throughout this month. Today I want to check out Hikaru tsunami. This is an invention by Baku Yamaguchi, and they can be used as modular building blocks that interact with each other Hikaru blocks, communicate by light and the tsunami blocks operate, the commands that include switching dialing, etc. , etc.

So to use them you can build, you can stack, you can take them apart. You can rearrange them into fully customizable robots, little gadgets and machines, and a lot more. Your creativity knows no limits with the Hikaru tsunami. Now Yamaguchi hopes that these blocks can be used to educate children, about logic, based tasks, programming and hardware. I think they are so cute, and they have a very, very cool traditional look to them.

I just wish that they existed when I was a kid because I would totally be using these Baku Yamaguchi is one of the innovators that is exploring the world of the future, and you can see profiles and more innovators over at innovators. com e n. That's, I n, o, u v a t, o r s, dot, com, slash e n for English! Thank you so much to the innovation program for their support of my channel. So let's talk WhatsApp, so WhatsApp is a messenger for iOS and for android that is completely free, and it uses a phone's internet connection to allow you to send and receive texts and phone calls and photos and videos and documents and voice messages, all sorts of stuff. It also allows for group chats, and you can use the WhatsApp web to get access to all of these features on your computer as well.

It works with your phone numbers, so folks in your contacts list, can use whatever texting app that they want to send new messages, and you can send all of your messages through WhatsApp. Now, according to the WhatsApp iOS app, it can collect and link to you, your purchases, location contacts, device, identifiers or diagnostics, financial info contact, info user content and usage data. Now some of that data is used for advertisements and marketing in the app store apple recently added this new privacy labels section where you can actually see exactly what data is being collected. We knew that apple was planning to do this and so did the developers because they talked about it at WWDC in June of last year. So even journalists like me, were able to hear about it.

You can scroll down to see the app privacy and details about what all of this data collection means and how they use it and pro-tip. You can actually do this for all of your apps. Not just text messaging ones, each one has app privacy details available to you as a user. You can pretty much do the same thing in google play as well. You click into the app that you want to check out.

Furthermore, you click the arrow next to what's new or the about section, and you scroll all the way down to the at permissions section, it's kind of hidden. Furthermore, you click see more, and then you can see the list. That's not as easy as a nutrition label like Apple has added, but hey it's still there, and it is incredibly useful information. So WhatsApp needs a phone number to work, and you can also choose to set up a username, a profile picture, an about section and your profile audience. When you create an account, you have to give them your phone number in order to log in, and you can choose to sync your contacts from your phone's backup.

Here's another pro-tip, though you don't have to give WhatsApp access to your contacts. If you click don't allow, then your contacts are not synced. Disabling WhatsApp's, access to your contacts, also disables the ability to do things like set a status disabling. The camera also means you won't be able to take pictures within the app, but we are interested in the security and privacy settings now, if you do use WhatsApp, I highly highly highly recommend turning on two-step verification. This means that you will need a pin code anytime.

You want to register a new phone number with WhatsApp again, so if you need to reinstall it on a new phone or if you lost your phone, or it got stolen, and you have to buy a new phone and reinstall it there with the phone number, it's a six digit pin code and if you do install WhatsApp on another phone with the same phone number, your original phone will be logged out, so it only works with one phone at a time, if you're using the same phone number, also, you can use WhatsApp on a phone that does not actually have an ENIM or a sim card with that phone number. So if you have a Wi-Fi only phone like I have a burner phone, then you can install WhatsApp on that phone and connect it using a dummy phone number, like a Google voice number as long as you have access to that phone number so that you can receive the login code when you're registering your device. I was able to test this going between my iPhone 12 Pro max and my galaxy s21 ultra, so I do know that it works now under security. You can also show security, notifications, WhatsApp, does use and to end encryption, which also means that they cannot see chat messages in conversations. This is true.

End-To-End encryption only works if the person that you are talking to is also using WhatsApp as well, because they are running the end-to-end encryption from one app to the other. This is automatic. There's no opt-in needed every single message that you send to friends and family is end-to-end encrypted, which is nice. Business messages are also end-to-end encrypted, but that does not necessarily include, however, that business chooses to store those messages once they receive them and for the geeks like me out, there WhatsApp does have a white paper online about their e-2ee or their end-to-end encryption so that you can see how it's implemented tldr. They use the signal protocol by open whisper systems.

Why does that sound familiar because it's the same protocol that signal uses signal the app the competitor to WhatsApp, but it's open source, so WhatsApp uses it? So when you use tee, both people in the convoy have a key pair that matches you up and ensures that you are actually talking to the person that you think that you're talking to there is nobody. Listening in the middle of your conversation, if you turn on security notifications, you will get a notification of somebody's key pair like their security code, changes that will tell you that they've reinstalled the app on a new phone if they registered a new phone, etc. , etc. If that happens, I do recommend getting in touch with your contact on some kind of other platform, just to ask them about the change and make sure that that was actually them and not somebody else running an attack against their phone number or WhatsApp account hello, sim swapping. If you didn't see my video on sim swapping, you should totally watch it.

Okay and then we have privacy settings. You can choose what audience sees all of you're everyone, my contacts or nobody pretty self-explanatory. If I make my photo on my profile set to my contacts, that means anybody not in my contacts, will not see my photo so on and so forth. I also wanted to mention when you give WhatsApp the ability to access your contacts, you could also set up messages to disappear. That means that they will disappear from the chat thread after about seven days.

That does not mean there is not a way for your contact to still save disappearing messages. People can still screen record the application. They could take a screenshot. They could take a picture of it with an external camera, or they could save media to their local device. So disappearing messages is not necessarily gone forever, especially if you're talking to somebody that would do that.

Then you have auto downloads, which is another feature that is enabled by default. That means that any media sent to you will automatically be downloaded to your phone. It's convenient yeah, but it also opens up your phone to potential vulnerabilities, a simple photo of a cute cat, like my cute little Luna or my cute little Starbucks. That might just look like a simple photo, but the bits stored within that photo could also be a Trojan for an exploit that could be used by an attacker again crucial to know who you're talking to and who you're texting and why I definitely check if somebody's registered device changes, contacts could still accidentally send you infected media, especially if they don't know that their phone is infected, but newer hardware and mobile operating systems are getting better and better each day at detecting this kind of attacks, but it's still a thing that does actually happen. In fact, Jeff Bezos, who recently left Amazon he was hacked exactly one year ago, using an infected video message.

So it's definitely still a thing. So I turned this setting off just in case now. You have read receipts where you can see whether somebody has read your message. That's already opted in. You can turn it off, but group chats always have that enabled.

Lastly, WhatsApp does have a screen lock option as well, where you can require a face ID or an unlock to unlock the app before you can actually use it. You can also set the timeout interval too, so it will automatically lock after you haven't used it for a set amount of time, but keep in mind. You can still respond to notifications and answer calls, even if this is enabled now a few other things I wanted to know about: WhatsApp security and privacy. The app itself is not open source, except for the encryption, because that is using the signal protocol. The data collection when compared to other security chat platforms is pretty extensive, but Facebook Messenger is by far the absolute worst of the bunch in terms of data that is linked directly to you.

Now, if you don't want WhatsApp to keep your phone number or your profile data, you can delete your account like I am going to do right after I finish editing this video tutorial, because I have absolutely no reason to use web sap. I already have a great secure messenger that I have been using for years. It's called signal, and I've mentioned it like three times in this video. I highly recommend if it's the best, and it has all the same features. So why not use it, and I think that I will do a video about how I set up my signal, especially all the security and privacy preferences too.

Just so you know how secure you can actually make it now. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive of WhatsApp's security and privacy. I know there's a lot of confusing information out there, so I hope that this cleared up some of that, for you, if you are new here, subscribe to become a part of this amazing community seriously. We have some amazing folks that are checking out the comments and checking out my discord if they're on Patreon. I also have a buy me a coffee link down below, so you can support this channel, and you can join folks like Aaron and Kirk who just became patrons.

Thank you both comment below and let me know which app you use for messaging, I'm very curious if you use any of the secure ones, thanks again to my s'mores, for subscribing and for watching, I'm Shannon Morse, and I will see you soon. Bye you all.

Source : Shannon Morse