Your WhatsApp messages aren’t safe from hackers because of this gaping flaw
WHATSAPP has revealed that messages stored on Google's free back-up service aren't as secure as the ones safeguarded by its own internal systems.
The Facebook-owned chat app recently teamed up with Google Drive to offer Android users unlimited storage for their WhatsApp data.
Backing up your data is crucial to ensuring it's easily available when you switch phones.
In the past your back-ups counted toward your Google quota, with a free 15GB worth of space available to users.
But what seemed like an attractive deal comes with a glaring caveat: all the chats dumped on Google's servers won't be encrypted.
That means that unlike on WhatsApp – where the texts are hidden behind lines of code that is indecipherable to anyone other than the sender and recipient (known as end-to-end-encryption) – Google can access them whenever it so chooses.
And in the worst case scenario, so too could hackers.
What is end-to-end encryption?
It's available by default on WhatsApp, but how does the privacy feature work?
- Encryption stops unauthorised access to your data, from emails to WhatsApp chats, by locking down communication between the parties involved.
- This is done by "scrambling" the messages sent from one person to another into a code that looks like gibberish to anyone else.
- Only you and the recipient can decrypt the jumbled-up content into a readable condition, which is done using unique "keys" granted to the users involved.
- WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram all enable end-to-end encryption by deafult.
- While Facebook Messenger gives you the option to manually turn it on for individual conversations.
"Due to a new agreement between WhatsApp and Google, WhatsApp backups will no longer count against Google Drive Storage quota," Google told users in an email.
"This policy will come into effect for all users on 12 November 2018, although some users may see the quota benefits earlier. To avoid the loss of any backups, we recommend that people manually backup WhatsApp before 12 November 2018."
But it didn't mention the security issue – that was left to WhatsApp, which buried the revelation in a support entry on its .
"Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive," it wrote.
Encryption has now become the norm on tons of chat apps (even data guzzler Facebook has it as an opt-in feature for Messenger), but Google has infamously resisted it.
It won't, for instance, be included on the big G's default texting service for smartphones, Android Chat. And the same goes for Google Drive.
Apple users have nothing to worry about as their back-ups are stored on iCloud.
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This isn't the first time WhatsApp has noted that content stored in backups isn't encrypted, but with the new deal coming into effect on November 12, now is a good time to be aware of the fact.
To ensure that your data is kept secure, recommends implementing strong Google account passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA).
What messaging app do you recommend? Let us know in the comments.
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