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URGENT Warning Dont Use Facebook Messenger on iPhone & Android
URGENT Warning to Avoid Using Facebook Messenger on iPhone and Android devices
The service has come under fire for failing to use end-to-end encryption like WhatsApp, another Facebook-owned app - reportedly putting privacy and content at risk
Daily Mirror UK, 13 JUL 2021.
If you still use Facebook Messenger, then you need to be aware of the social media giant’s warning that an “essential” security update is now seriously delayed. And while you might be thinking about hanging on, what was seen as a simple update has become horribly twisted.
For Messenger’s 1.3 billion users, is it finally time to quit? If you’re a regular reader of this column, you’ll be well versed on the critical differences between Messenger and Facebook’s other hyper-scale messaging platform, WhatsApp. While the latter encrypts all the content between senders and recipients, ensuring that no-one—not even Facebook—can read any of it, Messenger does not.
The company admits that it monitors content, and we recently exposed it for doing even worse.“The first step of keeping people safe is, you have to have strong security,” WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart said last month, as the secure messenger launched yet another privacy campaign around the strength of its encryption.
“We think governments shouldn't be out there trying to encourage tech companies to offer weak security.”So, on the face of it,
Facebook’s promise back in early 2019 to extend WhatsApp’s encryption to protect Messenger content was a good thing, right?
Many users and security professionals certainly think so. “We need encryption for all conversations, all platforms,”
ESET’s Jake Moore tells this week’s Straight Talking Cyber—the video at the top of this story. “Otherwise, companies will be selling our data, profiting from it.”But with Messenger, this isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. WhatsApp is a point-to-point messenger, where you can only contact people or numbers you know, with Messenger you can search and browse the site, contacting those you do not.
Facebook’s most controversial update in years risks the platform “failing to protect children from avoidable harm,” one of the world’s leading children’s advocacy groups, NSPCC, warned this week, telling me that the evidence they have seen suggests “a significant drop in reports of child abuse” on its sites.
Where a messenger is directly linked to a social media site that hosts user profiles, especially where that includes minors, there are serious risks in shielding messaging content, in preventing that content form being monitored. This isn’t a theoretical risk.
The investigators who brought U. K. pedophile David Wilson to justice this year say that he may not have been caught with Facebook expanded encryption in place. U. K. children’s charity NSPCC tells me that “10% of child sexual offences on Facebook-owned platforms take place on WhatsApp, but they account for less than 2% of child abuse the company reports to police because they can’t see the content of messages.”
We saw the impact this can have with the 58% reduction in child exploitation reports after the EU’s ePrivacy directive. While an emergency reprieve has addressed this, child advocates claim this is illustrative of the impact encryption will have.
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