According to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Meta must ensure interoperability between its WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger platforms and third-party messaging services. Privacy-focused messaging platforms Signal and Threema, however, have expressed no interest in this correlation.
While integrating with WhatsApp could provide Signal and Threema with a significantly larger user base, both companies steadfastly decline to pursue this. Signal’s President, Meredith Whittaker, stated that, “We’re not planning on lowering our high privacy standards. On the contrary, we’re interested in improving them. Collaborating with Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even Matrix would deteriorate data protection.”
A representative from Threema echoed this sentiment. “The fundamental issue is that we have different privacy and data security standards. We can’t compromise on them – they’re the foundation of Threema’s philosophy,” they said.
Although WhatsApp supports end-to-end encryption like Signal and Threema, it lacks advanced metadata protection that indicates who sent messages, when, and to whom. Both Threema and Signal noted that the closed-source code of WhatsApp prevents a clear determination of how user data is processed.
In addition, any companies interested in collaborating with WhatsApp would have to sign an agreement committing them to apply the same end-to-end encryption standards. This requirement further diminishes the attraction of such a partnership.
This post was last modified on 03/11/2024