Major Flaw In WhatsApp Leaves Your Conversations Open To Prying Eyes

Thanks to last month’s big Facebook acquisition, WhatsApp has been attracting a lot of attention lately. While that should only help grow its already impressively large 450-million-person-strong user base, that extra attention also means that more people are placing the app under a critical light. Today we learn of a potential security vulnerability in how WhatsApp saves logs of your conversations; what exactly is the problem here, and is it one you need to be concerned about?

WhatsApp uses your phone’s SD card for storage (whether physical or a virtual part of the internal file system), and that’s where it keeps a database containing the content of past chats. Problem is, with the lax security Android affords SD card data, that database is quite easy for another app on your phone to read (and then, if it were malicious, to send your chat data to some remote server).