Leaky faucet: Twitter trolls WhatsApp’s privacy issues

In what could be one of the biggest data breaches, phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users were allegedly put on sale online. This triggered a meme fest on social media, with users trolling the app over privacy concerns.

Recently, Cybernews reported about the sale of a database containing numbers of users from 84 different countries, including the US, UK, India, Bangladesh, Italy, Saudi Arabia and more. It is said that the hacker had posted an ad on a hacking community forum, claiming that they are selling a 2022 database of 487 million mobile numbers using WhatsApp.

It is said that the database has information of 6.1 million Indian users.

With more than two billion active users, WhatsApp is one of the biggest online free messaging platforms, with a reputation of being relatively safe due to its end-to-end encryption feature for its chats on the app.

In response, WhatsApp refuted the claims. In a statement, the messaging platform told India Today, “The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp.”

Cybernews chief editor Jurgita Lapienytė tweeted, “There’s no evidence WhatsApp has been hacked. The leak might be a scrape but that doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous for the affected users.”