It’s tough to be safe on the mobile market. There are several apps that you should not download if you want to maintain your privacy and security. Case and point, Meta has filed a lawsuit against a handful of app developers it believes to have stolen the data from millions of WhatsApp users.
This Meta lawsuit is against three companies in particular
The tech giant has its eye on three companies (HeyMods, Highlight Mobi, and HeyWhatsApp), and they all develop unofficial WhatsApp apps for the Google Play Store. Not only that but they also release their apps onto third-party APK sites and their own websites.
As you can imagine, this is the perfect way for bad actors to get your information. Meta says that when these apps are installed, they then release malware onto the device. This malware will then harvest the users’ credentials, hijack their accounts, and send spam messages to other users.
Once they get ahold of your information, then they can do whatever they want with it. The Meta lawsuit alleges that these unofficial WhatsApp app Developers have access to millions of WhatsApp users’ data.
“The Defendants programmed the Malicious Applications to communicate the user’s credentials to WhatsApp’s computers and obtain the users’ account keys and authentication information (collectively, ‘access information’).”
Not only is this illegal (and really scummy), but it’s also against Meta’s terms of service. These apps impacted a large number of users, which means that Meta has sustained some sort of damage.
We are unsure how much Weta is suing these companies for, but we can expect that it’s not going to take it easy on them. We will have to wait for more information from the story, as it is still developing.
Be sure to avoid unofficial apps
Unofficial apps seem to be tempting at times. They often advertise features that the official apps don’t offer. While it’s possible that they can, a lot of these apps cannot be trusted. You don’t want to enter your information into any third-party companies, because you have no idea where that information will go. The best thing to do is to avoid using unofficial apps no matter how tempting they may be.