Over the years, communication between people has become effortlessly simple – from making gestures, writing and sending letters, making phone calls using telephones, to sending messages with just a tap of a button. 

Thanks to the continuous progression of technology, more telecommunication platforms are being built, allowing people to have more modes of communication. In today’s world, mobile messaging or chat applications like WhatsApp and WeChat continues to gain popularity. Mobile IM apps allow users to send texts, make voice calls or video calls, as well as send emoticons and stickers (picture messages), helping people express their thoughts concisely as to how they would in a live face-to-face conversation.  

Furthermore, these mobile chat apps also became a fundamental tool for enterprises in regulated industries as these platforms help them efficiently and effectively comply with data retention laws. Such laws require the public sector and financial sector, among other sectors, to have systems and policies for capturing text messages, mobile call monitoring, WhatsApp call recording, and archiving these electronic records in an accessible electronic format. 

But as more people are using chat apps to exchange messages, various individuals are becoming more concerned about online privacy, data breaches, and identity theft risks. Thus, since consumers are having increasing demands for better security and privacy in these mobile IM applications, many companies have included features like end-to-end encryption in their chat apps. This encrypts messages during transmission, ensuring that only the sender and recipient will see the messages and that no copy is stored unencrypted on the service providers’ servers. 

Here is an infographic from TeleMessage that compares encryption, privacy, and safe usage of mobile chat applications.