Mehab Qureshi

Every day, over 5 billion people exchange more than 100 billion messages across WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and Signal. Most assume their chats are private but a growing body of research suggests that metadata, backups, and ad-driven architecture still leave cracks in that promise.

According to Kaspersky’s Privacy Rankings of Popular Messaging Apps 2025, many users continue to overestimate how private their chats really are.

The report notes that “direct messages sent through a chat app are often perceived as a private conversation, [but] it’s actually not that simple,” explaining that messages, metadata, and even user behavior can still be exposed through advertising, AI training, and law enforcement access.

A Pew Research Center survey in 2023 showed that about 81% of Americans believe companies will use the personal information they collect in ways that people are not comfortable with, and 80% think it will be used for purposes other than what users originally intended.

The irony, researchers say, is that encryption itself isn’t the weak point, it's the data around it. Who you message, how often, when, and from where that metadata remains visible to platforms and can reveal social patterns at scale.

2021: When WhatsApp broke the privacy illusion

This tension exploded in January 2021, when WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to allow greater data sharing with its parent company Meta. Users were greeted with a pop-up demanding consent. Within 72 hours, Signal and Telegram downloads spiked briefly knocking both apps offline from sheer demand.

According to App Annie data reported by Business Insider on Jan. 13, 2021, Signal’s daily downloads surged by more than 4,000%, while Telegram added over 2.2 million new users in just 48 hours, figures confirmed by Reuters on Jan. 8, 2021. The sudden influx briefly caused outages for both apps as privacy-conscious users fled WhatsApp’s ecosystem.

Meta scrambled to clarify, saying the policy only affected business messaging tools, not personal chats.

The backlash marked a turning point not just for messaging, but for how users perceive privacy. For the first time, ordinary people began to understand that “encryption” and “data collection” could coexist.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the memorial service for political activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium on September 21, 2025 in Glendale, Arizona. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on September 10th while speaking at an event during his "American Comeback Tour" at Utah Valley University. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Encryption wars 2.0: Apps evolve, governments push back

In the four years since, encrypted messengers have evolved in very different directions.

• Signal doubled down on privacy, introducing username-based contact systems to hide phone numbers and adding “sealed sender” technology to obscure metadata even from its own servers.
  
• Telegram, while offering optional end-to-end chats, focused more on communities and cloud backups, drawing criticism for weaker default security.
• A 2025 SWOT analysis notes that WhatsApp’s core strength remains its global user base (2+ billion) and its “privacy-first” brand (end-to-end encryption). But weaknesses include limited revenue streams and mounting regulatory pressure. Opportunities lie in payments, commerce, AI, business tools; threats include rival messaging apps and tighter regulation.
  
  

Meanwhile, governments from the European Union to India began drafting laws demanding “lawful access” to encrypted content, citing national security and child-safety concerns. The European Commission’s Chat Control proposal, still under debate in 2025, would require scanning encrypted messages for prohibited material, a move privacy advocates call “encryption backdoors by another name.”

In short: as users demanded more privacy, states demanded more visibility. The middle ground shrank.

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Elon Musk and 'X Chat'

Now, Elon Musk is positioning himself squarely inside that tension.

During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, published on Oct 31, Musk unveiled a new encrypted messenger called X Chat, built on the backend of his social-media platform X (formerly Twitter).

“On X, we just rebuilt the entire messaging stack into what’s called ‘X Chat,’” said Musk during the podcast. “It’s using a peer-to-peer-based encryption system, kind of similar to Bitcoin. It’s very good encryption; we’re testing it thoroughly.”

He said he hopes the app will roll out “in a few months,” adding:

“It won’t have any hooks for advertising,” he said, contrasting it with competitors like WhatsApp, which “knows enough about what you’re texting to know what ads to show you.”

Musk argued that the same data hooks enabling ad targeting also create potential attack vectors:

“That’s a massive security vulnerability because if it knows enough information to show you ads, that’s a lot of information,” he said. “Hackers could use those same hooks to read private messages.”

The billionaire added that X Chat will be available both inside the X platform and as a standalone app:

“I’m not saying it’s perfect, but our goal with X Chat is to replace what used to be the Twitter DM stack with a fully encrypted system where you can text, send files, do audio [and] video calls, and I think it will be the least insecure of any messaging system.”

'Similar to Bitcoin’, what that actually means

Musk’s comparison between X Chat encryption and Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer model raised eyebrows in the cryptography community. Bitcoin itself isn’t an encryption system for secrecy, its security comes from distributed consensus and public-key cryptography used for signing, not hiding, transactions.

But the analogy may refer to decentralization, eliminating central servers that can read or intercept messages. In a Bitcoin-like architecture, each device could act as a node, exchanging encrypted packets directly without relying on intermediaries. That approach, if implemented, would bring messaging closer to Web3’s ethos of self-custody and verifiable transparency.

Musk promised that X Chat “won’t have any hooks for advertising.”

Encrypted messengers without ads — like Signal — rely on donations and grants. Musk, however, has an entire monetization engine built into X Premium subscriptions and upcoming financial services. A privacy-first messenger could serve as a trust anchor for the broader “everything app” vision, giving users a reason to stay inside the ecosystem for payments, trading, and communications.

The looming quantum threat

Musk’s foray into the encrypted X Chat model comes at a time when quantum computing is becoming stronger each day.

Quantum computing could eventually shatter the cryptographic foundations that protect everything from WhatsApp messages to blockchain transactions.

A RAND Corporation analysis says that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could “quickly break essentially all of the encryption systems that are currently used to secure internet traffic,” while the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre has urged institutions to migrate toward post-quantum cryptography by 2035 to guard against what analysts call the “harvest-now, decrypt-later” era.

In other words, data intercepted and stored today could be decrypted years from now once quantum hardware matures.

How will quantum computing impact bitcoin's security?

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Mehab Qureshi

Mehab Qureshi is a Senior Editor at TheStreet, bringing nearly a decade of experience covering the crypto industry. At TheStreet, he leads coverage on regulation, tokenization, and Wall Street’s adoption of crypto. Please reach out to him on mehab@thestreet.com