Like we’ve mentioned before, WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption has long been one of its main selling points, but it’s been sorely lacking on the backup end of things thus far. The Facebook-owned social media platform began testing end-to-end encrypted backups back in July, and the feature is now making its way to the masses.
WhatsApp backups with no backdoors
The feature is rolling out to iOS and Android users through its latest update, so if you’re keen on using it ASAP head over to your respective app store. With end-to-end backup encryption, you can secure your backups with either a password of your choice or a 64-digit encryption key that only you know.
Neither WhatsApp nor any third party drive host (like Google or Apple) will be able to access your backups and read your messages.
“WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays between you,” reads an official announcement from the company. “With more than 2 billion users, we are excited to give people more choices to protect their privacy. We will be rolling this feature out slowly to those with the latest version of WhatsApp.”
If you’d like to know more about how the company’s end-to-end encryption system works, you can read up on it here.
In theory, this is great, but if you’ve been keeping up with WhatsApp and Facebook lately you’ll have heard that their promises of total safety and privacy aren’t totally honest. And expanding the same end-to-end that’s proven to be less than utterly impenetrable does little to dissuade prevailing ill will.