The use of leaked WhatsApp chats by investigating agencies in the Bollywood drugs case has raised concerns about the privacy of personal messages.

The investigation conducted by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in Bollywood’s alleged drug links has relied heavily on WhatsApp chats between individuals. As leaked WhatsApp chats retrieved by investigating agencies make headlines, concerns about the privacy of personal messages have also risen. Is WhatsApp’s promised end-to-end encryption safe enough? We try and answer the questions this investigation has underlined.

Does WhatsApp store chats content on its servers?

It’s important to remember that people sign up on WhatsApp using only a phone number, and WhatsApp doesn’t have access to your message content, a WhatsApp spokesperson told India Today. The messages are sent as locked packets of data from one user to another which can be unlocked only by a key called “end-to-end encryption”, available only with the sender and receiver of the message.

Court documents filed in the United States have shown that the instant messaging service keeps metadata of the user data which includes data associated with phone numbers during a conversation, time and duration of the conversation, IP addresses and data used to identify the user’s phone details.

In the US, law enforcement agencies have obtained such data from WhatsApp through court proceedings and WhatsApp parent company admittedly accepts and rejects data requests from law enforcement. A WhatsApp spokesperson did not comment when asked about what kind of data it provides to law enforcement agencies in India.

How did NCB get WhatsApp chats?

The easiest way for law enforcement agencies to obtain such data is to seize a user’s phone and extract the data directly from their phone. Even before the NCB started its investigation into the case, another central agency Enforcement Directorate (ED) was scrutinising the allegations of money laundering in actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death case. It was ED that first seized and cloned the cell phones of Rhea Chakraborty and later same data was used by NCB in its investigation.

Source – indiatoday