“Changes of this complexity risk turning a competitive and innovative industry into SMS or email, which is not secure and full of spam,” he says. “Making end-to-end encrypted messaging apps interoperable is technically challenging and creates real risks for privacy, safety, and innovation,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, said in a statement. Basic features such as messages between two people should be implemented three months after a tech company is asked to provide them audio and video calls have a four-year deadline. The proposals put forward as part of the DMA-which has yet to be fully published-don’t include technical details on how interoperability would work, but officials say the changes should be rolled out over a number of years. “It is very likely that there will be a serious degradation of the cryptographic techniques that will be necessary in order to accommodate this proposal,” Kobeissi says. “When you start talking about different companies exchanging encrypted communications with one another, there are many serious considerations here that are extremely difficult to resolve,” says Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer and founder of decentralized publishing platform Capsule Social. As a result, the largest messaging platforms-including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, which the DMA designates as gatekeepers-will have to open up to rivals. Under the European Union’s wide-ranging Digital Markets Act (DMA), which European lawmakers approved last week and is expected to be implemented this year, the owners of messaging apps will be required to make them interoperable if another company requests that they do so. If you use Signal and your friends only use WhatsApp, someone has to compromise. But it’s not possible to send a message from one encrypted app to another. Millions of people use iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal to chat with friends, family, and colleagues, and those conversations are all automatically protected by strong encryption. Sounds great, right? Well, we have some bad news.Įvery day, billions of messages are sent using end-to-end encryption. The newest law designed to rein in Big Tech aims to make all your favorite messaging apps work seamlessly together.

How does whatsapp work technically