WhatsApp Google Drive Backups Don’t Get End-To-End Encryption

WhatsApp is the most popular cross-platform messaging service. It lets users backup data to Google Drive. Many don’t send a lot of media files through WhatsApp so their backups would be small. However, those who share a lot of content would have heftier backups which would obviously take up space in Google Drive. The company recently teamed up with Google and announced that WhatsApp backups won’t count towards Drive storage. However, these backups won’t be encrypted.

Starting November 12th, WhatsApp backs stored in Google Drive will no longer count towards the account’s storage. The Facebook-owned messaging service has started informing users, though, that the end-to-end encryption offered for messages and media on WhatsApp won’t be applicable on backups that are stored on Google’s servers.

The service is leaving it up to the users to decide if they want to backup their data to Google Drive. They will be informed when backing up that their data won’t be encrypted when it’s stored in the count. Google does have encrypted on the server side but it reportedly holds the keys for decrypting the information.

This means that they could provide access to law enforcement should the need arise. The vast majority of users won’t be concerned with this and will continue to make use of this anyway. It doesn’t affect WhatsApp users on iOS as their data is not backed up to Google Drive but to iCloud instead.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: google drive, Whatsapp