Amid the ongoing conflict, Iran has issued a new directive to its citizens, this time concerning the widely used messaging app WhatsApp.
Iranian authorities, via state television, have instructed the public to delete WhatsApp due to alleged safety and privacy risks.
Here’s what you need to know about this nationwide instruction.
Why has Iran instructed its residents to delete WhatsApp?
On Tuesday afternoon, Iranian state television advised residents to remove WhatsApp from their smartphones, citing concerns that the platform collects user data and shares it with Israel.
Residents were also reportedly encouraged to avoid using other “location-based applications.”
The television report provided no evidence to support these privacy claims.
How has WhatsApp responded to the claims?
A WhatsApp spokesperson told TIME on Wednesday morning that the Meta-owned messaging service is worried about the reports from Iranian state television.
“We’re concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most,” the emailed statement read. “All of the messages you send to family and friends on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted. We do not track your precise location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging, and we do not track the personal messages people are sending one another. We do not provide bulk information to any government.”
WhatsApp’s publicly available information states that “end-to-end encryption” effectively “locks” conversations between users, preventing anyone, including WhatsApp, from accessing the messages.
Has Iran issued warnings or taken action over WhatsApp before?
Several social media and messaging applications are either banned or severely restricted in Iran, including Instagram, Telegram, and X, although millions of Iranians still access them using VPNs.
In 2022, WhatsApp and Google Play were banned by the Iranian government following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Iran restored access to WhatsApp and Google Play in December 2024.
Wider privacy concerns about WhatsApp messaging
While Iran has not presented evidence to support its recent directive to residents, privacy concerns about WhatsApp have existed for a long time.
In January, Meta claimed that journalists and other WhatsApp users were targeted by spyware from Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware developer.
The company said that at least 90 users in over two dozen countries were targeted by a “zero-click hack,” which uses a malicious electronic document to compromise an account without any user interaction.
The identity of those behind the incident and which of Paragon’s clients might have ordered the attack remained unclear.
In May, the NSO Group—the Israeli company that created the Pegasus spyware—was ordered to pay WhatsApp $167 million for a hacking campaign targeting 1,400 users in 2019. Meta called the ruling “an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone.”
Meta asserted that WhatsApp was not the sole target of the attacks, and that Pegasus “has had many other spyware installation methods to exploit other companies’ technologies to manipulate people’s devices into downloading malicious code and compromising their phones.”