Well, this doesn’t sound too safe.
We spend a lot of our time on Whatsapp. Whether we’re messaging our BFFs, our mums or our work colleagues it’s safe to say that it’s one of our main forms of communications these days.
However, the latest update seems to be a bit of a dodgy one.
Up until now the app would protect every message using end-to-end encryption, which means that every message is secure, and can only be read by the people sending and receiving it.
That has now changed since Whatsapp has added free backups, provided by Google, that break that encryption.
Everything is still kept private on your phone – but the backups are not encrypted, which means that potentially anybody can see what texts and images you are sending and receiving.
It’s only Android users that are affected however, as they have Google Play services installed on their phones and are signed up with a Google address.
The company’s help page makes it very clear that messages are not protected, saying: “Important: Media and messages you back up aren’t protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.”
You can delete backups by going onto Google Drive and going into the ‘manage apps’ setting.
