Keep your conversations private with these super secure messaging apps

Photo credit: AFSUSA

Secure messaging apps used to be something only certain insiders used. Journalists dealing with high-profile sources, businessmen conducting secretive deals, or, well, terrorists plotting the next attack.

Apps like Telegram, Threema, and Signal sprung up to address the needs of the privacy-conscious.

But then Facebook introduced end-to-end encryption to its more than 1 billion WhatsApp users in April.

End-to-end encryption means only sender and recipient can see each other’s messages. They can’t be decoded along the way, not even by the app maker. In WhatsApp’s case, the encryption is based on the Signal protocol – the same tech also used by open source messenger Signal.

Overnight, secure messaging became mainstream. Still, that doesn’t mean every app is equally secure. Understanding the differences can help you decide which messenger to settle on.

What to look for in secure messengers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has seven criteria to assess how secure a chat app is.

An important one is the previously mentioned end-to-end encryption, which removes the possibility that the provider hands over chat logs to governments that ask for them.

Another set of criteria involves the quality and openness of the code: Has it been recently audited and checked for flaws? Has it been independently reviewed?

That’s where most proprietary chat apps like WhatsApp and Threema fall short. Their code isn’t public like open source code is. This means you have to trust them enough to believe they haven’t snuck something into the code which could let them override the encryption in specific cases.

But overall, WhatsApp scores pretty highly in terms of the privacy it offers. It gets six out of seven points in an EFF scorecard.

That’s much better than most mainstream chat tools.

Yahoo messenger, Blackberry messenger, QQ, Kik messenger – all popular in Asia – don’t do well in EFF’s eyes.

Most secure messenger apps

If you want to stay off the record, and prefer companies with independently reviewed code, you really only have a few options, says the EFF. (Note that the EFF’s chart is slightly outdated, and some of the tools mentioned there have merged since, leaving only five instead of seven apps that check out in all categories.)