While the privacy face-off between Apple and FBI was happening, on March 1st Facebook Vice President for Latin America was arrested over refusal to comply to a court order demanding disclosure of WhatsApp conversations. These kind of injunctions will be pointless from now on, as end-to-end encryption means that the messaging service will have no access at all to users' conversations, which will be decrypted exclusively by the intended recipient of the message.

The new system will be activated by default with the next WhatsApp upgrade, irrespective of the kind of phone that the user owns. Additionally, the participants of a group conversation will be alerted if people in the group are running an older version of the app that doesn’t support encrypted group messages.

In his blogpost, Whastapp funder Jan Koum explained the move by saying that, having grown up in soviet Ukraine, the desire to keep users conversations completely private is for him a personal matter.