‘Turkey wants to make its own chat app publicly available in six months’

Turkey released its own chat app this week for certain organizations under the name PttMessenger. The software should be publicly available in six months and compete with services such as WhatsApp. Critics fear monitoring communication.

Reuters news agency writes that the app is named after the PTT, the Turkish postal company. Initially, the application is only available to government agencies and some companies. The service’s site offers few clues about functions and other properties, but only states that it is a ‘national, secure messaging application for companies’. The news agency writes that the service should be “safer than WhatsApp”, according to a government spokesperson. No data would be stored on the server, so access is not possible, the spokesperson said.

Details about the security of the app are not mentioned. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption based on the Signal protocol, which is also the basis of the chat app of the same name. Whether PttMessenger uses the same form of encryption is unclear. According to Reuters, opponents of the Turkish service fear that it will give the government more possibilities to keep an eye on dissenters. There is also the possibility that the service will become mandatory for employees of certain organizations.

Turkey has temporarily blocked several services in the past, including social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as chat services.