WhatsApp conversations saved on Drive would be vulnerable

Several American prosecutors accuse Google of having lied about the WhatsApp conversation. When these are saved to Drive, they would no longer be encrypted. Posing a major problem in terms of confidentiality.

An investigation by several prosecutors in the United States implicates Google. It is our colleagues from Frandroid who relay the conclusions of this investigation. A major privacy flaw concerns WhatsApp conversations. In fact, since 2015, Android phone owners have been able to record the application’s exchanges on your Google Drive. A very practical feature to keep your data when changing phones.

Google accused of lying by omission about WhatsApp

Google’s promise about this feature was to keep these items confidential. Indeed, WhatsApp prides itself on offering end-to-end encryption of conversations. As quoted by Frandroid, 17 American prosecutors denounce a memo of the American company considered to be incorrect. ” WhatsApp currently reports that all communication through its product is end-to-end encrypted, with keys that only users have. They failed to clarify that data shared from WhatsApp to third-party services does not have the same guarantee. This includes backups to Google Drive. “

According to the complainants, this status created confusion among users of the application. Indeed, this lie by omission would have allowed the company to bring even more customers to Google Drive. In 2016, 434 million users had saved data from the application while in May 2017, the figure rose to 750 million. The American investigation team denounces the ambivalent position of Google, which was able to exploit exposed data. The files in question did not have any protection once they were saved to the Drive.

Source: Frandroid