Iran urges citizens to delete WhatsApp, citing unsubstantiated espionage claims
Iranian state television on Tuesday called on citizens to delete WhatsApp from their phones, accusing the messaging platform—without presenting evidence—of collecting user data and sending it to Israel.
In response, WhatsApp rejected the allegations, stating: “We’re concerned these false claims could be used as a pretext to block access to our services—especially during times when people rely on them most.”
The company emphasized its use of end-to-end encryption, which ensures only the sender and recipient can read messages. “We don’t track users’ precise locations, we don’t keep logs of who is messaging whom, and we don’t provide bulk data to any government,” WhatsApp said.
End-to-end encryption scrambles messages so that even if intercepted, they appear as unreadable gibberish without the correct decryption key.
However, cybersecurity expert Gregory Falco, an assistant professor at Cornell University, noted that some metadata—such as timestamps or contact lists—can potentially be analyzed, even if the message contents remain encrypted.
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