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.
"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.
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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