Whatsapp “has been a monitoring tool for 13 years now,” it says telegram founder Pavel Durovwho says he deleted it Metaplatforms Inc. META App from his devices “years ago”.

What happened: “Hackers could have full access to everything on WhatsApp users’ phones,” Durov wrote on Telegram.

He quotes Amazon.com Inc. AMZN founder Jeff Bezos’ Phone hacking incident in 2020 and said: “It doesn’t matter if you are the richest person in the world – if you have WhatsApp installed on your phone, all your data is accessible from every app on your device.”

See also: WhatsApp jumps on the original content bandwagon with the NBA’s “Greek Freak.”

Whatsapp Expectations to have fixed the latest vulnerability. The platform added that the bug was discovered and fixed internally before there was any evidence of exploitation.

Why it matters: WhatsApp is cross-platform which means it can be used by both iPhone and Android users. Recently, a vulnerability called “Integer overflow error‘, which was rated ‘critical’, affected its Android app. It could have allowed attackers to remotely install malware on a person’s smartphone during a video call.

See also: Android WhatsApp users can exhale: a big bug that exposed data may finally be fixed

Although Durov attacks WhatsApp for security reasons, Telegram also had some problems. Outside of its limited “private chats,” Telegram only encrypts data between users and its servers, not between users themselves, Forbes reported.

In comparison, WhatsApp had end-to-end encryption, making it available globally across platforms.

Continue reading: As the CEO of Telegram Web3 wants to bring NFTs to 700 million users

This story was originally published on October 10, 2022.

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