With Targeted Ads Coming to WhatsApp This Year, Is the Instant Messaging Industry Ripe for Change?

Since its inception in 2009, WhatsApp has widely been considered the standard-bearer for instant messaging apps.

Allowing users to send text messages, images, documents, and other media, as well as offering video and voice calls, WhatsApp protected all of its user’s information by way of end-to-end encryption. All provided on an advertisement-free platform.

Thomas Koller, CEO of ATRONOCOM, believes that “We are entitled to privacy of communication, and nobody wants others reading personal messages about illness, business secrets, research, or data — anything for that matter.” And most people would agree.

While Whatsapp is currently private, this is about to change in 2019.

After months of rumors, a WhatsApp spokesperson has finally confirmed that targeted ads will be implemented this year while claiming that the end-to-end encryption that WhatsApp has become known for will remain intact.

Questions remain unanswered

The reaction to the announcement from the WhatsApp spokesperson has been understandably less than favorable, but the whole process leaves a few questions that will need answering.

The first of these, is how Facebook (which owns WhatsApp) is going to be able to utilize targeted ads for users if they have no access to the end-to-end encrypted messages those users are sending?

As things stand, the only information that Facebook has access to on WhatsApp users is their phone number, which raises the question of exactly how Facebook intends to implement targeted advertising when they supposedly have no access to WhatsApp users data?

According to a security researcher who worked with WhatsApp on building its original end-to-end encryption protocol, there are “nuanced” ways that allow the encryption process to remain intact, but that would also allow Facebook to receive data about what people are saying in their WhatsApp messages.

An opportunity for a fresh approach?

Many observers are unsettled by the possibility of such a tactic being employed by Facebook, including WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who famously walked away from $850 million when he resigned from Facebook after being informed of the route they were planning to take in implementing targeted ads.

He later invested $50 million in the small messaging app, Signal, which intends to run with a mission to put users privacy before profit.

While WhatsApp and Facebook are undoubtedly the Kings of the instant messenger world at the moment, the various scandals regarding Facebook and users information are only leading to more questions being asked and more people becoming disillusioned with how business is being done.

The door is open for fresh ideas and new companies to make part of the instant messenger industry their own. It remains to be seen if anyone is ready to step up to the plate.