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Apps such as WhatsApp have become an everyday part of life, and work; as the UK covid inquiry has shone a spotlight on.
During the pandemic, government ministers such as Health Secretary Matt Hancock and their officials communicated by the app, as notoriously revealed in the Daily Telegraph in 2023. Last year the former Scottish Government First Minister Nicola Sturgeon admitted to the inquiry to deletion of her WhatsApp messaging from the covid months. Quite apart from how that looks โ by convention the paperwork of government is archived and made available to the public, or under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI), can be requested โ what of security of such messaging, brilliantly engineered to be convenient?
A go-to document for private security and crisis management remains Baroness Louise Casey’s review for the Football Association of the mass disorder outside Wembley Stadium as thousands without tickets tried to get into the venue for the final of the Euros football between England and Italy. Casey began with how in the morning, fans without tickets were already looking for pubs to drink in:
At 9.02am, one [Brent Council] official alerted council colleagues, FA and Wembley managers, the police and other local partners via WhatsApp. He wrote: โTalking to fansโฆnone with tickets, just here for the occasion. Might be a big feature of the day.โ Shortly afterwards, a colleague in the Brent licensing team replied that pubs had told her earlier in the week the phones had been ringing off the hook with fans hoping to reserve seats for the game. She wrote: โExpectation therefore is that our streets will be full of street drinking particularly with people not attending the game as most just want to come for the atmosphere.โ
As Casey added drily: “Both predictions proved correct.” In other words, from the start of that July 11, 2021 Sunday, the signs for mass trouble were there; except the police and others in authority had been too slow to note and react, until the trouble-makers were too numerous to tackle; because the authorities assumed fans would gather at Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square (which saw mass trouble at the Euro 96 tournament). At midnight, Brent officers were still using WhatsApp, by now to remark on the unprecedented, 31 tonnes, of rubbish to clear, including ‘masses of broken glass’. Casey detailed also how chats on WhatsApp and on other apps between the ticketless aided their efforts to breach the Wembley stewarding and security.
Signalgate
Push-share feature, for example, for posting on social media โ tempting to do, and if someone does it all the time in their private life, might they inadvertently do it with something sensitive? In March, The Atlantic magazine in the United States made public the text between senior Trump administration officials and the military, about air strikes in Yemen against Houthis, as discussed on the Signal messaging app. While President Donald Trump described it as โnot a big dealโ, others found it a security risk โ quite apart from the embarrassing details of the actual action, but for what might be going on routinely (how careful are the groups about whoโs a member โ in this case, a journalist?). As is the way with scandals, ever since the Watergate affair that brought down President Nixon in the 1970s, it got named โSignalgateโ.
Privacy settings
WhatsApp and Signal stress that they encrypt messages so that only those sending and receiving can read them. However, what of privacy settings โ are you sharing your โlive locationโ โ which if youโre in a war zone like Houthis, you wonโt want to share if you might be bombed by America; if youโre a celebrity or high net worth individual (HNWI), you might want to keep your whereabouts private, whether to avoid intrusive fans and photographers, or gatherers of commercial intelligence who might extract meaning from where you are. Are you hiding your โaboutโ information, and your profile photo (otherwise, are scammers scraping them? What then, if a scammer creates a fake profile and becomes a member of a group, and tries to sell fake lottery tickets, or claims to be from โtech supportโ?). WhatsApp, part of Meta, does offer a privacy check-up tool; and see the Signal website about their approach to privacy.
Scots policy
The embarrassment around Nicola Sturgeonโs deletion led to a Scottish Government review by former Channel Islands data protection commissioner Emma Martins, published in December 2024, and a policy begun in June 2025 that Scottish Government employees including contractors, senior civil servants, special advisers and Ministers, that mobile messaging apps and non-corporate communication channels will not be permitted on government devices. Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: โI want to reassure the public that it is a priority of this government to maintain secure and searchable data, ensuring compliance with all records management rules. We will continue to act to ensure our data policies are robust, especially considering technological advances.โ
Other platforms
As that implies, numerous other platforms are around, and in the United States they have found demand spurred by โSignalgateโ. At the platform Genasys, Jeff Halstead, Senior Director of Strategic Accounts, said: โSince the controversy, we are experiencing increasing demand for CONNECT information, demonstrations and orders from public safety leaders in small towns and large metro areas across the United States.
โMany public safety leaders now understand the importance and legal requirements of owning and controlling Interactions when planning and responding to crisis events. During the last two weeks of national protests [in early June, for example in Los Angeles], I was contacted by more than a dozen police chiefs thanking me for helping them elevate their communication networks.โ
WhatsApp has advantages of ease of use, and billions are already using it. For example, the recent Channel 5 documentary Fare Dodgers: At war with the law, showed an operation against a suspected long-term fare evader by South West Trains counter-fraud staff, who used WhatsApp to stay in touch as the suspect took a train into London Waterloo โ his usual route, except that the SWT staff didnโt know which train he would take; and making phone calls would have been more fiddly and might have aroused the suspectโs suspicion. However, platforms such as Genasys, Everbridge and Halo offer an altogether more considered and efficient approach – because communicating is always with the aim of doing something (see here a recent blog by Tracy Reinhold, the American chief security officer at Everbridge), such as managing an incident, or even confirming something isnโt as serious as first reported. The alternative is what Halo recently termed โa Frankenstein mix of WhatsApp groups, Excel sheets, radio logs and a prayerโ.
