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What the app? What will WhatsApp's pursuit of revenue mean for no-strings encryption
Ads are coming to WhatsApp - but what does that mean for their encrypted messaging? Privacy and online business models haven't always got along...
News & Analysis
Post date
27th June 2025
It feels like WhatsApp is everywhere. Who isn’t familiar with the gentle ding as a message arrives - the relentless group chats, or the customer service bots? According to recent statistics, the service is used regularly by nearly 3 billion people around the world. Its core service - end-to-end encrypted messaging - is essential in today’s society.
But private messaging services like WhatsApp are costly to run, and not something people are accustomed to paying for. Securing an income stream for them isn’t obvious. So it made the news recently that WhatsApp is going to start showing ads - in a relatively limited way - as part of a wider push to generate revenue.
This raises alarm bells for privacy. WhatsApp's parent company Meta isn't exactly known for respecting user privacy in its approach to ads. And while WhatsApp ads won’t (at this moment) use messages to target or post ads, they will potentially draw from data gleaned from other Meta services like Facebook and Instagram.
Online advertising isn’t inherently bad - so long as it’s done a way that is non-invasive and non-manipulative. But we are right to be sceptical of Meta’s track record in this area. Private messaging does not make for an easy bedfellow with public feeds and targeted ads - something that Meta should know, not least given recent problems with its AI app.
The UK Government vs the world
The timing of this announcement was interesting - as just days earlier the company threw its weight behind the legal challenges brought by both Apple and PI (plus our allies) to defend privacy in our fight back against the UK Government’s brazen attempts to undermine encryption.
Our battle to protect encryption is essential for the right to privacy. Encryption (and in particular end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp) means that people can communicate safely, with the knowledge that no-one is listening in to their messages or collecting data that is not meant for them.
Being able to speak freely and openly with those that we trust allows us all to develop and grow into who we are, without fear of external pressure and influence.
WhatsApp’s support in this fight is telling and powerful. Our concerns cannot be dismissed as those of paranoid activists or idealistic academics. There is a cold hard business case for privacy online too. Businesses want their services, and their customers, to be secure. And that case runs deep, cutting across contested interests: Meta and Apple hardly see eye-to-eye on other matters of Internet governance.
Encryption without strings
Encrypted messaging and data storage are services that form an essential part of today’s digital, social, even public, infrastructure. But their operation is in large part reliant on the economic rationale of private business (and/or the philanthropy of billionaires) to function. But the primary business model of Meta - and lately the Internet as a whole - is surveillance advertising.
While there are alternatives to WhatsApp, governments have not generally sought to provide public online messaging services (unlike postal services or phone networks). And if they were to do so, it’s hard to imagine that they would be safe from prying eyes: PI fought long legal battles following the Snowden revelations of 2013 which demonstrated a myriad of ways governments have demanded access to communications systems.
Governments around the world are intent on breaking into encrypted services to get hold of whatever data they can. In yet another piece of recent WhatsApp news, Iran has accused the company of providing data to Israel. The accusation does not specify how this might be happening. One possibility is that WhatsApp has been forced to turn over the metadata it collects (laws do put in place obligations to provide such data to governments under certain circumstances). This may rather be another attempt by an oppressive regime to shut down local access to the Internet, but who can forget that the US government “kills people based on metadata”?
Metadata Explained
Watch this video to learn more about what metadata is, why it's important, and what it reveals
A vibrant digital economy
So where do we turn? We need our communications to be safely away from spying eyes and unjustified government intrusion. But we also need business models that don’t depend on strong-arming people into accepting data extraction and exploitation. Subscription models and paying for services is acceptable, just not when it is used to bully people into consenting to something they otherwise wouldn’t.
And offering additional paid-for services, as WhatsApp do around the world, is also ok - so long as it’s not done to turn WhatsApp into an ‘everything app’ that dominates the landscape. That’s bad for consumers and bad for a vibrant digital economy. The Colombian Constitutional Court has recently ruled against so-called ‘zero rating’ of WhatsApp because of its effect on net neutrality and freedom of expression.
Time and again, new technology has empowered people and revolutionised our society. Getting it right is hard, but we know what we want to avoid: government hacking, secret backdoors, data exploitation and overly powerful corporations. And what we need: access to encrypted services that are affordable, non-exploitative, secure, non-dominant.
At times, that feels like walking a tightrope. With your help, we will keep fighting for tech infrastructure, privacy laws and market regulation that work for people, for society, and for freedom both online and off.
