WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, and its pushing back hard against governments on encryption - Business Insider

. It still falls behind Facebook core app, which has 2.5 billion users worldwide.

Cathcart used the interview as a chance to draw a line in the sand over end-to-end encryption, the system that allows WhatsApp users' messages to stay private and inaccessible even by WhatsApp itself. Recently WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook have come under pressure from the US government to create ways for law enforcement to circumvent encryption. Attorney General William Barr last year asked Facebook to delay its plans for encrypting all its messaging platforms — which"For all of human history, people have been able to communicate privately with each other [...] And we don't think that should go away in a modern society," Cathcart told the Journal.

The US isn't the only government that's been pressuring WhatsApp to provide encryption backdoors. Last year the allied "Five Eyes" countries for law enforcement — but stopped short of calling for actual technological "backdoors," security vulnerabilities deliberately left in a system. The argument against backdoors runs that they weaken the system as a whole as they could be exploited by malicious actors other than law enforcement.Facebook's suite of social media platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp, WhatsApp's engineers are still focused on a constrained set of products comprising private messaging, payments, and customer-service tools for businesses.

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