According to the 2024 report of global digital rights organization Access Now, around 37 countries worldwide have specifically brought adapted communication applications (e.g., gb whatsapp) under the purview of regulation. Among these, the European Union, under Article 12 of the Digital Services Act (DSA), Third-party applications need to pass security certifications (such as the EN 303 645 standard), or else the users stand to be fined up to 4% of their annual income. For instance, in March 2025, the German Federal Network Agency fined a logistics company 480,000 euros. The company’s personnel used unauthenticated gb whatsapp to forward customers’ personal data (for 125,000 order messages) and the data breach lasted for 14 months. Technically, gb whatsapp modified the official API interface, and its end-to-end encryption protocol coverage was as low as 68% of the official version, resulting in more than 3,200 man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) worldwide between January and May 2025, of which 43% targeted small and medium-sized enterprise users in the Asia-Pacific region.
Legal risks are strongly linked with regional policies. For instance, India’s Digital Sovereignty Act that was enacted in 2025 requires all servers of communication applications to be localized. Nevertheless, gb whatsapp was listed as a “high-risk application” by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology due to the fact that it utilizes a Dutch server (with latency time 120ms higher than the local server). If further used by the user, it may trigger Section 66D of the Information Technology Act (up to 3-year imprisonment). Meanwhile, Brazilian National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) tests conducted in April 2025 revealed that gb whatsapp’s voice call feature was protocol vulnerable, and there was a 19% chance of leaking call metadata (such as IP addresses and device ids), which was eight times higher than the official app. And it fails to satisfy the “minimum data collection” principle in the 2025 version of the Internet Civil Law Framework of this country.
Market statistics show contradictory trends. Despite the rising compliance risks, Statista figures show that gb whatsapp’s global monthly active users still reached 270 million in 2025 (an 8% year-over-year growth), of which growth came from emerging markets such as Nigeria and Pakistan, which accounted for 64%. Market research firm Canalys commented users in such regions are more inclined to accept the “trade-off ratio” of privacy feature vs. risk to legality – e.g., concealing online status adds 55% likelihood that business users will no longer be traced by competitors, yet cases of violation of the Cybersecurity Law owing to that increased 72% year on year between January and June of 2025. Actual-meter reading from tech review website Android Authority shows traffic of background data of gb whatsapp on the Redmi Note 13 Pro reaches 23MB/hour (to only up to 7MB, however, of the official app), which may offend the “principle of minimisation of personal data” given in Article 5 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This change also affects the determination of legality. On February 2025, statistics from the consulting firm Gartner showed that 34% of multinational business companies worldwide had banned their employees from using gb whatsapp as it failed to meet the ISO/IEC 27001 information security certification and the audit log retention period was less than 90 days (365 days for the official version). For instance, in the internal audit conducted in May 2025, the Spanish bank Santander discovered that staff employed gb whatsapp to send loan contracts without encryption, where 14% were not encrypted, and had to invest 2.7 million US dollars in updating the system to monitor communication. If the users choose to continue using it, Kaspersky suggests turning on a VPN (reducing the rate of IP exposure to 0.3%) and clearing cache data every 72 hours (the amount of leftover metadata can be reduced by 82%), but these actions reduce the speed of message loading by approximately 1.8 seconds per thousand messages. In general, gb whatsapp validity in 2025 depends on the dynamic equilibrium between jurisdictions, data flow features and user risk countermeasures.