WhatsApp is the instant messaging platform that most of us love and have come to trust. Chat messaging on the app has been end-to-end encrypted for a long time, providing enhanced security. But even though this protects your messages from being seen by others, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that every bit of your online identity is invisible to prying eyes, as one researcher has found out.

YouTuber Colin Hardy recently posted a video on his channel, demonstrating how your private IP address might be visible to external web servers when you talk about another website.

When you talk about a certain website with your friends on a social network (such as Facebook or Twitter), the server bots ping the address you're talking about to see whether it's an actual web page or not. You can see a preview of a webpage when you send a web link to someone. That's where the bots come in - they crawl the URL in question and fetch a preview if available.

That's all well and good. But pinging the external and getting a preview means that the external server can log the request for that traffic. This log includes the IP address of the server bot that's trying to access it. So for example, when you talk about google.com in a Facebook chat, Facebook bots will ping Google servers, and the Google servers will then log the request with the IP address of the requesting Facebook server. In this case, the user's private isn't visible to Google.

Unfortunately with Whatsapp, the user's private IP is also shown. So if you give your friend a URL for www.example.com, your private IP address will show up on the example.com web server.

Ideally, Whatsapp should be using their own servers to hit external servers, rather than using the device itself. This poses a potential risk to end users, and even though it's not a serious security risk, it is still something that you might not want - your IP address being recorded on an external web server.