Beware! WhatsApp fails to protect your online data
WhatsApp scores 1/5 in the ‘Who Has Your Back?’ report
With the ever-increasing online trends, there have been several instances of online password hacking, explicit posts, data hack etc. In order to keep an eye on the level of privacy/ security, online sites is capable of providing, Electronic Frontier Foundation analysed and presented its annual report.
The EFF annual report has rated all telecom and social media on the basis of five categories:
- Follows industry-accepted best practices
- Discloses government data demands
- Discloses policies on data retention
- Discloses government content removal requests
- Opposes backdoors
According the ‘Who Has Your Back?’ (EFF) report, WhatsApp has scored 1/5 and seems to fail the online private data. EFF basically focuses on digital rights, rates companies based on transparency to consumers about government data demands and accepts content removal requests as well.
As per the scorecard of EFF, WhatsApp doesn’t publish a transparency report about the requests it’s not received from the government nor does it provide users advance notice of government data requests. Media report also states that WhatsApp also fails to disclose its data retention policies.The EFF report clearly shows that WhatsApp allows government officials to gather user data (opposes backdoors).