In a world where digital privacy is as crucial a priority as ever, the messages we send and receive feel as if they are more personal than ever before. We post new stories, discuss sensitive topics, and reach out to family and friends for information. What happens, however, if a message contains a claim you want to validate or a topic you want to research further? Traditionally, you’d have to copy the text, open a browser, and paste it into a search engine: That means giving away your query and your very private chat to an unknown party. If you already use WhatsApp, one of the world’s most popular messaging services, then this new little feature in their app makes it impossible to do that: Simply search the web directly from the message itself without sharing it with another user and even letting WhatsApp or its parent company Meta know.
The Privacy Challenge in Messaging
A friend writes you a bad piece of news. You’re intrigued and you want to know if it comes from a reliable source, so you take a screenshot or steal the text and do a google search: Obviously this is an appropriate privacy response. It takes a private message out of the encrypted environment of WhatsApp Web and your phone, and into the huge and collecting universe of the open web, and creates a digital footprint that links your identity to that specific search query. To many users this is unacceptable: for health, financial or political data, for instance.
Introducing the “Search the Web” Feature
To solve this very problem, WhatsApp has added a “Search the Web” feature. Now that you have a message with some information that you’d like to look up, you can long-press on the message bubble. One of the options that will appear is called WA Web.” By clicking that option the contents of your private message aren’t sent to your WhatsApp account’s servers. Instead, a process is launched that was designed with your privacy in mind.
How It Works: A Technical Look at Privacy
The key feature of the way this works is that it uses a privacy-preserving protocol. When you select “Search the Web, ” your device first encodes the text of the message. This encrypted text then is sent to a third-party information retrieval service that WhatsApp has partnered with — this may be Google. Most important, though, this service receives the request without any identifying information attached. It cannot see who you are, or see that the request originated from ‘Whatsapp Web’ or the mobile app.
It decrypts the text only to make the search query. It then streams you a set of search results directly to your device – the service never sees the search results nor registers what you were searching for. Basically, the whole process is supposed to be a blind relay – which means that data in private messages does not ever turn into profileable data that can be associated with your account.
Why This Matters for User Trust
It is a profound new chapter for user trust because it shows for the first time the ability to take advantage of the utility of the endless trove of information available online (and therefore have no conflict between it and the fundamental promise of end-to-end encryption) and simultaneously to deliver a web search experience with unparalleled privacy. It is particularly useful when faced with potentially misleading information, where this can allow an end-user to do a quick and safe fact check without oversharing that fraudulent information or their findings to others. With Wa Web we’ve further extended this privacy protection to desktop users, for a consistent experience across all devices.
Limitations and Appropriate Use
It ‘s important to have a sense of what limits this function goes beyond. “Search the Web” is for textual conversations in which the recipients want to find information or claims, or news. It ‘s not for looking for video files or other media and it ‘s never meant to substitute for critical thinking. The results provided are based on the open web – they must be evaluated in terms of credibility and bias as you would evaluate any other search result. And in some extreme situations – some users could prefer to not use the search feature at all, which is always an option.
A Benchmark for Private Digital Experiences
It will be interesting to see what other companies think of this, and how they would define it. It proves that a product that allows its users to search the web can and does have utility without jeopardizing privacy. Telling people when to look up something can’t necessarily mean between being informed and being protected. Anonymized search is easy because in a world where data is constantly being collected for marketing purposes and sales goals, it becomes more and more difficult for companies to focus on user privacy. You can actually search the Web without knowing anything about your own message.