Yesterday, Judge Marcel Maia Montalvo issued a temporary ban on WhatsApp–to facilitate the progress of an ongoing legal case.
Here at TorGuard, we’ve seen these careless shotgun approaches hundreds of times where governments seek to disrupt everyone’s personal privacy and security just to find a select few. It’s always at the expense of thousands of legitimate people using the app who lose service to their preferred platform.
This is the second time Montalvo has issued bans on social media platforms. The first time the court managed to imprison a Facebook exec.
However, in both cases, Facebook and WhatsApp, the platforms can’t give away unencrypted information since the encryption is end-to-end (only people that are communicating can read the messages). In this particular example, and in many others, end-to-end encryption and the popular use of these platforms to facilitate communication has caused many governments and corporations to find fault in the system that provides power to users and not agencies or snoopers.
Users running into the IP block on WhatsApp managed to find success using a VPN service like TorGuard. Since a VPN masks and encrypts and changes an IP address, it can help circumvent an IP block like this one.
Today it looks like an appeal has been placed letting users access WhatsApp once more. President Claudio Paolillo explains that the “court order is a discriminatory and disproportionate-acting against a digital tool that, although some to use to practice crimes serve for the benefit of the communication of millions of people.”
If you want to avoid blocks like these completely, make sure to use TorGuard’s Brazil VPN service to unlock all communication and media services around the globe.
