The Office of Cybersecurity, operating under the House’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), said WhatsApp posed a “high risk to users” due to opaque data protection practices
The US House of Representatives has banned the use of WhatsApp on all government-issued devices, citing cybersecurity and data protection concerns. The decision, disclosed in a memo circulated on Monday and first reported by Axios, was later confirmed by Reuters.
The Office of Cybersecurity, operating under the House’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), said WhatsApp posed a “high risk to users” due to opaque data protection practices, the lack of stored data encryption, and other potential vulnerabilities. According to the memo, House staff have been instructed to uninstall the app from all House-managed devices, including phones, desktops and web browsers.
“If you have a WhatsApp application on your House-managed device, you will be contacted to remove it,” the CAO said in the communication. In place of WhatsApp, staff have been advised to use other secure messaging tools, including Signal, Microsoft Teams, Wickr, Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime. The memo also urged staff to be vigilant about phishing and suspicious contacts.
Meta Platforms, which owns WhatsApp, has sharply criticised the move. In a statement to Axios, spokesperson Andy Stone said: “We disagree with the House Chief Administrative Officer’s characterisation in the strongest possible terms.”
He defended the platform’s security standards, noting that WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption by default—ensuring only senders and recipients can view messages. “This is a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAO’s approved list that do not offer that protection,” Stone said. Meta expressed hope that House members would eventually be permitted to use WhatsApp, as Senate staff reportedly still can.
Concerns over WhatsApp’s vulnerability to spyware resurfaced earlier this year, when a company official confirmed that Israeli spyware vendor Paragon Solutions had targeted journalists and civil society actors through the platform.
The messaging service has also drawn criticism in Iran amid its ongoing tensions with Israel. This month, Iranian state media reported that government officials had urged citizens to delete WhatsApp over claims that location and other sensitive data may be leaking to the Israeli military. Though no evidence was presented to substantiate the allegations, Meta strongly denied them.
WhatsApp remains one of the world’s most widely used messaging services, but growing scrutiny from governments and cybersecurity agencies has put pressure on the company to increase transparency and accountability in how user data is handled.
