There were suspicions from the start. But it wasn’t until Alice*, 31, hacked her way into her boyfriend’s WhatsApp chats that she knew something was going on. “I felt terrible about it, but I also needed to know if he was hiding something from me,” she recalls. “And I knew his passcode.” She didn’t see any conversations that raised eyebrows.
Then she noticed “locked chats”, a feature that allows users to take a thread out of their WhatsApp inbox and put it into its own separate folder that can only be accessed via a device password or a biometric, such as a fingerprint. “There were all of these chats with his ex,” Alice sighs. “I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
