In fact, despite the two companies touting their encryption as ready out-of-the-box, you actually need to flip a few subtle switches of your own to activate that level of security. For the two companies’ massive userbases-more than 700 million phones run Viber, and more than a billion run WhatsApp-that switch seems to represent the start of a new era where strong encryption is no longer a privilege for geeks and paranoids, but an effortless mainstream tool.īut that effortlessness hasn’t arrived quite yet.

In just the month of April, both WhatsApp and Viber switched on that layer of protection from surveillance, which is designed to make it technically impossible for anyone to read the services’ messages other than the people in conversation: not eavesdropping hackers, not law enforcement, and not even the companies themselves. End-to-end encryption by default is quickly becoming the new standard for any communications app that claims to care about the privacy of those who use it.

Ae viber message encrypted