WhatsApp and Telegram can be your default messaging app by your choice, but not everyone can use it. Gangsters, terrorists, illegal extremists and other criminals depend on some apps that hardly anyone has heard of. This is the reason why the Indian government had banned some apps, which were creating problems for the security officials.
There is also an app named ‘Zangi’, banned by the Centre, which has reportedly been found on the phones of arrested members of notorious gangs centered in Delhi-NCR, Haryana and Punjab. ‘Zangi’ is one of the 14 mobile apps that the government approved in India in May last year.ban“Did it.
These apps were banned
Apart from ‘Zangi’, Nandbox, 2nd Line, Threema, Safeswiss, Element, IMO, MediaFire, Briar, BChat, Crypviser, Enigma, and Wickr Me were reportedly banned due to security concerns. If sources are to be believed, these apps were being used by Pakistan-based handlers to communicate with terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.
What’s the problem?
In short, messages from these apps cannot be tracked or retrieved.
Unlike other popular messaging apps, apps like Zangi, Threema, Nandbox, Element do not require users to provide even basic information like phone number or email address to register. Instead, a user can generate his own URL to contact other users.
For example, if we talk about Zangi, here users only have to create a user name and password to sign up. After this, users get a 10 digit number, which can be used as a virtual phone number.
The app is said to have “military grade” end-to-end encryption, making it difficult to track users and retrieve their messages. Encryption and decryption of messages happens on the devices of the sender and receiver.
(Wicker Me shut down its service last year, while Conion, Crypviser, and Enigma were no longer available on the Google Play app store as of December 17, 2024.)
Unlike other commercial messaging apps, apps like Zangi do not store chats on any centralized server, which means that investigating agencies cannot retrieve those messages in a criminal case. For example, if we talk about Zangi, the message on it gets deleted after being read. The app does not collect any kind of data.
Most of these apps are free to use. Those that are not free provide services to ensure that agencies cannot track their payments. For example, Threema – which has more than 1 million downloads on Google Play – asks its users to send cash payments by courier to its registration office in Churerstrasse, Switzerland.
Surveillance-proof structures create problems for officials. In this situation, they can neither keep an eye on the person chatting nor can they present him in the court. The developers say that these apps have been created for the use of activists, journalists and opposition leaders in authoritarian countries.
However, just as any asset can be used for illegal purposes, apps can also be used with ill intentions. Wicker Me was an app of Amazon, which stopped its service last year. There were allegations on this app that content related to child sexual abuse is shared on it.
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