Man asks Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu: How private are pictures shared between a husband and wife on Arattai chat app; read his reply

Zoho’s homegrown messaging app Arattai recently gained immense popularity. This increasing popularity of the WhatsApp rival also brings in questions about privacy. A curious user recently posed a question on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) about the privacy of Arattai. The question went viral and Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu responded to the query.The exchange started when an X user named Ravi asked, “Forget secret lovers. Can a husband and wide exchange intimate pictures between them? Who all at Zoho have access to these pictures? Straight forward answer please.”Replying to the X user Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu posted, “I said this clearly. Our entire SAS business is based on trust we do not access customer data and we do not use it for selling stuff to them. End to end encryption is a technical feature and that is coming. Trust is far-far more precious and we are earning that trust daily in the global market. We will continue to fulfil that trust of every user of our product everywhere.”Zoho CEO Mani Vembu recently said that the company will soon introduce WhatsApp-like end-to-end encryption to its messaging platform Arattai. In an interview with Money Control, Vembu said “we are working on it and see already in the personal messaging, we have an option called personal chat or secret chat.” “So that means you could enable it and then say have the conversation. We are not yet making it default. The entire team is focusing on that. So soon, we will enable that for all the users,” he added.Vembu was responding to the question “When will end-to-end encryption be available for text chats?”The interaction comes amidst the rising popularity of Arattai on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store. According to the company, the app touched over 7.5 million downloads on both app stores as on October 3, 2025.Arattai offers familiar features such as:* One-to-one and group chats with text, voice notes, and media sharing* Audio and video calls with end-to-end encryption* Multi-device support, including desktop and Android TV apps* Stories and channels for broadcasting updatesHowever, the app is still ironing out issues. Users have reported OTP delays, slower contact sync, and call glitches due to server overload. Zoho has acknowledged the problems and said fixes will take “a couple of days.”