Global messaging phenomenon WhatsApp has just turned on end-to-end encryption for all messages for its Android smartphone users by integrating the open-source software Textsecure into the latest version of its Android App.

This means that spies and hackers will be unable to read messages that you send to your friends and family through WhatsApp even if they manage to intercept them on the way.

The encryption is currently only available on the Android version of WhatsApp and only applies to text messages sent to individual users, not to group messages and not to video or images sent as well.

However an iOS update is in the works that will secure messages on Apple’s iPhones as well as an update to the way the rest of the data sent by users is encrypted to cover all of your communications in the future.

This year has taught us that sending instant messages from one person to another is big business, just ask the folks over at WhatsApp after they were bought by Facebook for $19 billion (R209 billion) earlier this year.

2014 has also taught us that there are people, agencies and countries out there trying to read everything on the internet including those messages that you send to your friends and family.

WhatsApp’s founder Jan Koum has been open about his feelings when it comes to state surveillance. “I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on,” he told the UK edition of Wired earlier this year. “Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state—the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech. Our goal is to protect it.”

[Source – Wired, Image – Shutterstock]