JAKARTA All members of the US House of Representatives (DPR) are now prohibited from using WhatsApp on their government apparatus. This rule is issued on security grounds.
This ban was issued by the Head of Administration (CAO) of the US House of Representatives via email. They consider WhatsApp a high-risk application because Meta, the owner of the platform, lacks transparency regarding how to protect user data.
WhatsApp is also said to have no stored data encryption so that its security risk is very high. Therefore, all congressional staff are not allowed to download or use WhatsApp on government officials.
This ban applies to mobile devices, desktops, and other types of devices. Congressional staff are also not allowed to download and store WhatsApp in their device browser even though it is not installed and used.
"If you have a WhatsApp application on a device managed by the DPR, you will be contacted to delete it," the US House of Representatives CAO wrote in its email, quoted via The Verge on Tuesday, June 24.
Alternatively, members of the DPR are advised to use other messaging applications. They can use device built-in applications such as Google Message, iMessage, and FaceTime as well as third-party applications such as Microsoft Teams, Signal, and Wickr.
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After news broke that the US House of Representatives was banned from using WhatsApp, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone made a statement on his X account. Stone denied that the app had a high security risk.
He emphasized that WhatsApp implemented an end-to-end encryption system innate so that third parties, including WhatsApp and Meta, could not read its users' messages. Thus, the accusation of US House of Representatives' CAO was considered invalid by Stone.
"This is a higher level of security than most apps on CAO-approved lists that don't offer that protection," Stone said on Monday, June 23.
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