Google has decided to adopt an updated SMS architecture, to work with the carriers rather than providing Android with an “over the top” equivalent to iMessage.

iMessage does exactly the same-as long as it’s that blue bubble, once you go green and SMS, then all bets are off. No-one-including the network and WhatsApp-can see what you have sent. What it means, put simply, is that the message is secured with only the sender and the recipient holding the decryption key. Many reading this will know exactly what this means-but a surprising number of users are still unaware of the differences. Last year, I reported on a Chinese cyberattack on global carriers pulling SMS from senders and recipients at will.īack in 2016, WhatsApp fixed this by defaulting to what’s called end-to-end encryption.

And given we text people on different networks and in different countries, your SMS can travel across a hotchpotch of different network servers and systems. Once the SMS has disappeared into the network, it is open to interception. When you send an SMS, the data is encrypted between your phone and the cell tower-it can’t easily be intercepted over the air, as such.

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