Members of the Chamber of Representatives with a ban on using the WhatsApp messenger

Members of the Chamber of US representatives were informed on Monday that they could not use WhatsApp's official devices on their official devices due to the protection of their data – Axios said.

“The Cyber ​​security office recognized WhatsApp as a high risk application for users due to the lack of transparency in the scope of user data protection, no encryption of stored data and potential hazards of security related to its use,” wrote the office of the Chamber of Representatives in the email, which Axios reached.

The messages show that members of the Chamber of Representatives cannot download or have this messenger on official devices.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for the Meta group, to which WhatsApp belongs, emphasized in a statement to Axios that Meta rejects criticism from the Chamber Administration Office. “We know that members (chambers) and their colleagues regularly use the WhatsApp application and we expect that members of the chamber will be able to join colleagues from the Senate and do it officially” – he added.

The spokesman pointed out that the news at Whatsapp is encrypted by default, so only recipients can see them.

“This is a higher level of security than in the case of most applications on the list approved by the Administration Bureau that does not offer such protection” – he emphasized.

As Axios pointed out, in recent years at least partial bans have been introduced by members of the House of Representatives from Chatbot Deepseek, the Bytedance company application and AI Microsoft Copilot software. The possibility of using chatbot chatgpt has also been limited – employees can only use its paid version, i.e. ChatgPT Plus.

From Washington Natalia Dziurdzińska (PAP)

ndz/ kar/