Online privacy is a vital aspect of our daily lives, especially as governments worldwide conjure up newer ways of keeping tabs on their citizens' lives. One of thetop free texting appsavailable today,WhatsApp, already has safeguards in place to protect messages from prying eyes, such asend-to-end encryption. The app’s developers are now devising a way to bolster the security of calls on the platform even further with the help of IP address relaying, effectively routing calls to its servers for added security.
The folks over atWABetaInfofound this under-development feature within WhatsApp beta for Androidv2.23.18.15, currently rolling out via the Google Play Store. However, I was unable to find it on my test device, though it’s likely that the feature will appear more widely in the coming days. When available, the new toggle should appear while navigating to Settings > Privacy > Calls on WhatsApp, as illustrated in the screenshot below.
As the toggle reads, enabling it would “make it harder for people to infer your location,” with a brief explanation of how WhatsApp would go about achieving this. There’s also the warning that call quality would be sacrificed to have this extra layer of security for your calls, making it likely that it’ll remain an opt-in feature that not too many would be willing to use.
Since there’s no mention of this being limited to either voice or video calls, we presume this privacy safeguard would apply to both. Meanwhile, WhatsApp’ssupport pagemakes it pretty clear that calls, in addition to texts or media sent on the platform “are secured from falling into the wrong hands” with the help of end-to-end encryption.
On the whole, it’s welcoming news that WhatsApp is working on more ways to improve user security, which is pertinent given the longstanding accusations of neglecting user privacyon parent company Meta Platforms.
