Secure Messaging Can Protect Your Chats, But What About the Rest of Your Identity?

Don’t just hide your messages from snooping outsiders; keep your identity from being stolen

Everyone wants privacy while messaging with friends, family members, or colleagues. It’s the ability to communicate freely without having any outside persons or entities—like the government, cellular carriers, online service providers, or hackers and scammers—eavesdrop on private conversations.

That’s why secure messaging (also known as encrypted messaging) apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger have become so popular. These apps essentially “scramble” chat communications so that outsiders can’t monitor private conversations; only the people directly involved in a chat have access to the actual contents of messages.

If you’re thinking about using a secure messaging app, or you’re currently using one and you believe it’s offering all the privacy protection you need, know that while these apps are valuable for privacy in communications, they aren’t designed to protect vital aspects of your identity.

Here’s how secure messaging apps work, what their limitations are, and the steps you can take to help achieve complete identity and privacy protection.

How secure messaging apps work

When you use the standard SMS text messaging service on your phone, your messages are unencrypted, meaning that they can be potentially intercepted and monitored by outsiders. Secure messaging apps solve this by using what’s called end-to-end encryption, which converts chat data into seemingly randomized code that’s indecipherable without a digital encryption “key.” The unscrambled content is only accessible to people directly engaged in the chat. With most of these apps, the encryption applies not just to text chats, but to voice calls made within the platform, as well as any document or media attachments sent or delivered.

As WhatsApp states on its website, “end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you’re communicating with can read or listen to what is sent ... With end-to-end encryption, your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to unlock and read them.” Using this process, “your messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents, status updates, and calls are secured from falling into the wrong hands.”

The limitations of secure messaging apps

While secure messaging apps are a great way to communicate outside the reach of prying eyes, remember that you have a lot of personal information associated with your identity, and much of this data is potentially accessible by bad actors in ways that have nothing to do with the direct hacking of chat messages.

No messaging app, for example, can prevent scammers from pretending to be a legitimate source and trying to lure you into giving up your personal information or clicking malicious links—a phenomenon called chat phishing.

Most importantly, these apps can’t protect your digital life beyond private messages. You have a trove of sensitive information, including your Social Security number, email addresses, physical address, phone numbers, date of birth, medical records, credit card numbers, and passwords, stored in databases associated with your online accounts, government registrations, and more. All of it needs protection, because if any of these databases were to become breached by cybercriminals, your information could wind up for sale on the dark web. And that could lead to your identity being stolen.

How to protect the full scope of your privacy and identity

Along with chatting privately on a secure messaging app, consider setting up a comprehensive identity and privacy protection plan like the IDX Complete Plan. It includes $1 million in identity theft insurance and a 100% identity recovery money-back guarantee. If you’re interested in protecting your entire family, there’s an option that covers two adults and up to five minor dependents under the age of 18.

The plan offers a wide variety of advanced tools and services designed to guard against widespread and emerging cyberthreats, including:

Password protection

You can create secure passwords and store them in a single, safe location with IDX Password Manager. It uses military-grade encryption technology to generate random, hard-to-hack passwords for each of your accounts; to access any of them, simply log into Password Manager using just one strong password. Using a tool like this is particularly important if you plan to share passwords among your family.

Dark web monitoring

You’ll gain a timely ally in your efforts to prevent identity theft with IDX Cyberscan. This valuable tool continuously monitors all layers of the web, including the dark web where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen identities, to search for any breach of your personal data. You’ll be notified immediately if your information appears to be compromised.

Credit monitoring

By activating IDX credit management services, you can help limit the damage from having your identity stolen. These services include automatic, 24/7 monitoring of your credit report and credit score. You’ll receive an alert whenever there’s new financial activity in your name, so you can act quickly if anything seems off.

The bottom line is, secure messaging apps are effective at shutting out people and entities that have no business monitoring your private conversations. But if you really want to guard against the full array of today’s cyberthreats, get covered with a comprehensive identity and privacy protection plan.