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You should be using two-factor authentication as much as possible – it’s even more important on accounts that hold your sensitive personal information, such as photos and messages. Unencrypted backups on WhatsApp has been an issue for years and it’s one the company knows about: some reports state WhatsApp is testing password-protected backups, but these have not been widely rolled out or officially announced by the company. In June 2018, former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is now a convicted felon and in home confinement serving a seven-year sentence, had his WhatsApp messages accessed through a federal request for his iCloud data. The process sort of defeats the point of the initial end-to-end encryption.įor instance, a law enforcement request to Google or Apple can see them handover the backed-up chat logs and the messages revealed.
That means if they’re accessed by someone else, the messages can easily be read. The backups of your messages aren’t properly encrypted. But there’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t back everything up to the cloud.
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WhatsApp wants you to backup your data – if you don’t have the setting turned on it’ll prompt you to start backing up every few months. These backups work by storing your data in Google Drive or Apple’s iCloud, depending on which operating system you use. WhatsApp allows you to backup your chats and data as a handy way to move all your information to a new phone – although this doesn’t actually work if you’re moving from iPhone to Android. Location information, when you turn it on, is also collected and there are cookies that track your activity within the desktop and web versions of the app. On top of this WhatsApp may also collect information about your phone’s battery level, signal strength and mobile operator. The company’s privacy policy says it gathers information about how you interact with others on its services (the time, frequency and duration of interactions with others), some diagnostic information about when the app crashes and other information such as any statuses you set, group features, your profile photo and when you’re online. Most of this is metadata, which can be revealing about user behaviour. WhatsApp collects more information about you than it shares with Facebook. However, it’s worth stressing that the content of the messages you send isn’t shared, as Facebook doesn’t have access to them due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. Some of this data sharing has been controversial: in May 2017 the company was fined £94 million by the EU for combining WhatsApp phone numbers with Facebook data after it told regulators it couldn’t easily be able to do so.Īny data sharing may come under further scrutiny in the future as Facebook looks to merge the infrastructure between WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram’s messaging. WhatsApp says your phone number from WhatsApp, device information (including the type of phone, mobile country code, and operating system), and some of your usage information (when you last used WhatsApp, when you registered and how often you message) are shared with other Facebook companies.