If you have an Android phone and use Whatsapp to keep touch with most of your friends then this piece of news can leave you worried.
According to a recent report published in a leading daily, an Android Whatsapp user must be careful about what he/she shares on the instant messaging app because anyone can dig into your chats and know your secret conversations.
As per a Dutch security consultant, WhatsApp chat logs saved on the SD card of an Android phone can be read by other apps, courtesy the way Android allows sharing of data between apps.
"The WhatsApp database is saved on the SD card which can be read by any Android application if the user allows it to access the SD card. And since majority of the people allows everything on their Android device, this is not much of a problem," Bas Bosschert wrote on his blog.
"What do we need to steal someone's WhatsApp database? First we need a place to store the database," Bosschert explained.
"Next thing we need is an Android application which uploads the WhatsApp database to the website," he added.
When Whatsapp is downloaded from the Play store or through an APK file, the app requests for permissions to use network and SD card etc.
Interestingly, to explain his claim, Bosschert set up a web server and then created an Android application that required several special permissions on a user's phone. And, as expected, Bosschert's app had no difficulty gaining access to WhatsApp data.
"The WhatsAppp database is a SQLite3 database which can be converted to Excel for easier access. Lately WhatsApp is using encryption to encrypt the database, so it can no longer be opened by SQLite. But we can simply decrypt this database using a simple python script. This script converts the crypted database to a plain SQLite3 database," wrote Bosschert.
"We can conclude that every application can read the WhatsApp database and it is also possible to read the chats from the encrypted databases," he concluded.

#Socialmedia #WhatsApp #Safe #Data #News