Popular messaging app and Facebook company WhatsApp announced via a blog post that it now has over 2 billion users worldwide. This is 500 million additional users since 2018 and a close shot at Facebook’s 2.5 billion users. The company’s CEO Will Cathcart says that the company has no plans to disable encryption on its service. “For all of human history, people have been able to communicate privately with each other, and we don’t think that should go away in a modern society,” he told The Wall Street Journal. However, he noted that WhatsApp will provide metadata when it is useful for an investigation.
New features are also expected to be rolled out soon ahead of the global launch. The long-awaited ‘dark mode‘, ‘disappearing messages‘, ‘ads‘, and ‘reverse image search‘. Both features are already available to some beta testers on Android and iOS.
