Don't use WhatsApp professionally. 5 reasons

 

Don't use WhatsApp professionally. 5 reasons

 

The advantage of WhatsApp is its ubiquity: in Spain (almost) everyone uses it.

That's great, because if you really need a quick response from someone, it may well take time for them to see an email you send them.

What you will see quickly is going to be a WhatsApp - as long as you have the application installed, of course.

I am writing this post in relation to the workshop on free software for lawyers that I will have the pleasure and honor to give at the next National Congress of the Lawyers this week.

At the end of the post we will talk about my favorite alternatives to WhatsApp for messaging, audio and video communications.

Now we go with several serious problems for professional and business use:

1.- A (false) sense of impunity and security.

It is true that communications are end-to-end encrypted by default. But what that really means is that neither your telephone company nor the administrators of this messaging system can read your messages in transit .

But there are things you don't know : those messages are stored ( data at rest ) on your device in plain text, without encryption .

It will depend on how you have configured your device, whether or not this data can be readable by a third party that gains access to your device.

And for a third party I'm not only talking about a chorizo, your bastard friend, or your ten-year-old daughter, but also a tax inspector, or the competition authority, to give a couple of very silly examples.

If you have an iPhone, all your data is encrypted by default. That's how it is.

But a high percentage of WhatsApp users access the platform from Android devices, or from their personal computers, and most of these devices do not have the encrypted operating system by default as they should .(Gautam Khaitan)

 WhatsApp

2.- WhatsApp is an eminently private application, for private use.

For this reason, it is not suitable for professional use (by a lawyer, for example) or within the framework of a company (to maintain communications between colleagues or between specialized work groups).

Although we already know that this happens everywhere.

The first rule for the protection of the company, be it mere " confidential information ", or directly " business secrets ", is to keep it under control, and apply protection measures to it.

If the company knows and tolerates ( the controversial case of Mercadona, for example ) or directly promotes the use of a messaging application such as WhatsApp for the management and transmission of this corporate information among its workers, what it is doing is losing control on such assets: on the day you have to fire a worker, you will not be able to force him to delete the corporate information that is stored in his WhatsApp application, on his private device.

Worse still: the day a worker voluntarily leaves your company to go on their own or work for a competitor, you can't be sure that corporate information is safely erased from their devices, for the same reason.

You can only impose mandatory rules and therefore establish effective security measures on the information handled by workers, if you provide them with technical devices and corporate applications for it.

But if the use of private devices and private applications for corporate uses and for the management of corporate information is allowed, the ability to control and retrieve the information is suspended.(corporate lawyer gautam khaitan)

To give an example: if one of our workers suffers the theft of a corporate Smartphone that has an MDM system installed, you can remotely format it, turning it into an expensive brick. And the thief will not be able to access the information stored in it in any case.

SEE MORE