WhatsApp conversations are going to be more secure and encrypted thanks to new techniques developed from Open Whisper Systems.

The first wave of encryptions will come for Android devices, and then iOS devices will receive them as well, The New York Times reports.

WhatsApp is a free messaging app that Facebook now owns. Whisper has over 600 million users, and without a powerful encryption service those users could all be vulnerable to hackers.

Before 2012, WhatsApp was an easy target. Eventually the company did make some improvements in their encryption tools for users of the service, but it still was not totally protected from hackers or even the company's own employees.

Now with end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp conversations will be encrypted from the moment they are sent to the moment they are received by the intended recipient. That means there is no worries of the conversation being intercepted.

"This level of privacy has typically only been found in smaller, specialty security-focused software, so it's exciting to see it happen on this scale," Moxie Marlinspike, a well-respected security researcher who co-founded Open Whisper Systems, told The New York Times.

The good thing about WhatsApp's new tools is that they will automatically be installed into the app. That means users will not have to go into their settings and turn on the encryption tools; they will already be on.

Even Facebook Messenger, which is the default mobile app for Facebook chat, is not encrypted this well. This could mean a switch by many Facebook users to WhatsApp. Facebook's chat feature relies on third party apps to help encrypt data because of the huge amount of users and how complicated it is to encrypt that much data.

It's nice to see WhatsApp going the extra mile to make sure users' conversations stay private. Even Ed Snowden approves of this end-to-end encryption system, according to Modern Readers.

Do you feel that your Internet conversations are secure and safe? What do you think of end-to-end encryption?

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