You should ditch the WhatsApp immediately because its a spyware, crafted to spy on you continually, claims Russian entrepreneur and Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Post the notorious MP4 vulnerability controversy in WhatsApp, Pavel wrote a long post through his official Telegram channel.
Pavel Durov's claims
"WhatsApp doesn't only fail to protect your WhatsApp messages – this app is being consistently used as a Trojan horse to spy on your non-WhatsApp photos and messages," wrote Durov.
Explaining the statement, he claimed that Facebook is associated with a surveillance program even before acquiring WhatsApp.
"It is naive to think the company would change its policies after the acquisition, which has been made even more obvious by the WhatsApp founder's admission regarding the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook: "I sold my users' privacy," he added. In 2018, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton mentioned in an exclusive interview with Forbes that he had sold his users privacy to a larger benefit.
Later Facebook held accused of revealing out its 87 million users data to a British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica just before the US general election. Mentioning the latest WhatsApp vulnerability, CVE-2019-11931, Pavel explained, "Following the discovery of this week's backdoor, Facebook tried to confuse the public by claiming they had no evidence that hackers had exploited the backdoor."
"Of course, they have no such evidence – in order to obtain it, they would need to be able to analyze videos shared by WhatsApp users, and WhatsApp doesn't permanently store video files on its servers (instead, it sends unencrypted messages and media of the vast majority of their users straight to Google's and Apple's servers)," Pavel added.
He claimed Facebook made this statement purposefully to convince its users how safe they are. But according to him, this sort of high priority exploits are bound to get exploited, alike how the journalists and social activists WhatsApp profiles got snooped using backdoors.
He further asserted that despite the increase in the number of evidence that Whatsapp is affecting the people, it might be that by accident the app implements critical security vulnerabilities across all their apps every few months.
Pavel Durov, who is also happened to found Russia's most popular social network VKontakte, is quite popular as a privacy activist also. He raged a war against the Russian authorities by declining to share data in the 2017 St. Petersburg metro station explosion case. For his firm stand, he hailed by millions of Russian privacy activists and social media users.
The Telegram founder maintains a channel in Telegram with around three and a half lakh active followers. He often writes about privacy issues or especially against its biggest business enemy Facebook's data privacy.
