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WhatsApp, with 3.5 billion active accounts as of early 2025, is the world's largest instant messaging platform. Given its massive user base, WhatsApp plays a critical role in global communication. To initiate conversations, users must first…
Online social networks, such as Facebook and twitter, are a growing phenomenon in today's world, with various platforms providing capabilities for individuals to collaborate through messaging and chatting as well as sharing of content such…
Internet social networks have become a ubiquitous application allowing people to easily share text, pictures, and audio and video files. Popular networks include WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn. We present an extensive study of the…
Messaging platforms, especially those with a mobile focus, have become increasingly ubiquitous in society. These mobile messaging platforms can have deceivingly large user bases, and in addition to being a way for people to stay in touch,…
Instant messaging services are quickly becoming the most dominant form of communication among consumers around the world. Apple iMessage, for example, handles over 2 billion message each day, while WhatsApp claims 16 billion messages from…
Social media enables users to publish, disseminate, and access information easily. The downside is that it has fewer gatekeepers of what content is allowed to enter public circulation than the traditional media. In this paper, we present…
Offering an architecture for social networking in which people have agency over their personal information and social graph is an open challenge. Here we present a grassroots architecture for serverless, permissionless, peer-to-peer social…
WhatsApp emerged as a major communication platform in many countries in the recent years. Despite offering only one-to-one and small group conversations, WhatsApp has been shown to enable the formation of a rich underlying network, crossing…
Rapidly changing social norms and national, legal, and political conditions socially constrain people from discussing sensitive topics such as sexuality or religion. Such constrained, vulnerable minorities are often worried about…
In the last few years, many closed social networks such as WhatsAPP and WeChat have emerged to cater for people's growing demand of privacy and independence. In a closed social network, the posted content is not available to all users or…
WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world. The closed nature of the app, in addition to the ease of transferring multimedia and sharing information to large-scale groups make WhatsApp unique among other platforms, where an…
WhatsApp is a popular messaging app used by over a billion users around the globe. Due to this popularity, understanding misbehavior on WhatsApp is an important issue. The sending of unwanted junk messages by unknown contacts via WhatsApp…
We present the design and implementation of the PeerShare, a system that can be used by applications to securely distribute sensitive data to social contacts of a user. PeerShare incorporates a generic framework that allows different…
Social networks, instant messages and file sharing systems are common communication means among friends, families, coworkers, etc. Due to concerns of personal privacy, identify thefts, data misuse, freedom of speech and government…
WeChat is a mobile messaging application that has 549 million active users as of Q1 2015, and "WeChat Moments" (WM) serves its social-networking function that allows users to post/share links of web pages. WM differs from the other social…
Messaging systems built on mesh networks consisting of smartphones communicating over Bluetooth have been used by protesters around the world after governments have disrupted Internet connectivity. Unfortunately, existing systems have been…
Using smartphones for peer-to-peer communication over the Internet is difficult without the aid of centralized services. These centralized services, which usually reside in the cloud, are necessary for brokering communication between peers,…
WhatsApp messenger is arguably the most popular mobile app available on all smart-phones. Over one billion people worldwide for free messaging, calling, and media sharing use it. In April 2016, WhatsApp switched to a default end-to-end…
Encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Signal provide secure and deniable communication for billions across the world, but these exact properties prevent holding users accountable for sending messages that are…
Telegram, initially a messaging app, has evolved into a platform where users can interact with various services through programmable applications, bots. Bots provide a wide range of uses, from moderating groups, helping with online…