On your Android phone, the popular messaging app WhatsApp now is providing end-to-end encryption. The Open Whisper Systems technology will move to iOS soon also. Whisper Systems was purchased by Twitter four years and the Open Whisper Systems is the open source off-shoot. With over 600 million users, keeping messages and pictures save from hackers has become more important every month with the NSA and hackers getting ahold of celebrity photos from Apple cloud services.
Since 2012, WhatsApp messages were received and sent with encryption but while on the companies servers were not stored securely. That has now changed. Now encryption is turned on by default with the mobile application. The encryption makes it much more difficult for hackers to steal messages off of public WiFi’s compared to before. Google started providing similar services within Chrome messaging just recently. Facebook has said the technology is difficult to implement and therefore was not being considered at this time.
WhatsApp starts encrypting users' messages