Ever wonder why you suddenly get schedule prompts in your messaging app while making plans to meet someone, or hotel recommendations on your social media feed after telling a friend that you wanted to travel?
That’s because certain social and messaging apps can take a peek into your private messages and use them as valuable data for their systems’ algorithms—or for their advertisers.
Filipinos are the top social media users in the world, and because we love connecting with our loved ones on these platforms, it should come as no surprise the Philippines was revealed as the 2nd in the list of countries with the greatest likelihood to have had their personal information on a certain social media site improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that specializes in data mining and analysis. Because of these recent events in the tech world, Filipinos have been concerned and alarmed about their privacy and the security of the personal data that they share over social media.
Private chats and audio or video calls, whether with one person or a group of a hundred or more, should stay completely private and personal. That’s why Rakuten Viber, a leading global messaging and voice app, has taken careful steps to ensure your data remains secure. In order to ensure that your data will always remain private, Viber uses end-to-end encryption.
What is end-to-end encryption?
All your private and group communications including chats, calls, and video calls are all encrypted by default, not as an option so that no one—not even Viber—can see, read or hear them.
When you send a Viber message, whether it’s on mobile or desktop, the data travels from your device to the recipient’s as a scrambled code so that only their device has the unique key to translate to plain text. Once your message has been delivered, none of the data is stored on Viber’s servers. In case your friend’s device is offline, Viber stores only the encrypted version of your message for a limited time still safe and secure until their device connects to the internet and is able to receive what you sent.
While other messaging applications may require you to manually enable encryption, end-to-end encryption on Viber is on by default so users don’t have to worry about turning it on and has been standard on the app since the feature was made available.
That means there’s no need to worry about suddenly receiving a targeted ad related to the subject of your private conversation—Viber cannot and will not, in any way, share your personal messages with anyone.
Viber is all about making sure you can enjoy better ways of communicating every day, and a big part of that is assuring you that the connections you make are strengthened by secure measures you can always count on.