WhatsApp Data Backed Up On Google Drive Won’t Be Encrypted

WhatsApp had recently announced that Android users will be able to store their chats on Google Drive starting from November 12, 2018.

Those backups won’t be counted towards Google Drive’s storage quota. But WhatsApp has warned that the free backup service offered by Google will no longer be protected with end-to-end encryption.

It is clearly stated in WhatsApp FAQs that the “Media and messages you back up aren’t protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.”

In case you are already using the backup feature, this applies to your currently uploaded backups as well, meaning that all your chats and media on the drive aren’t protected with E2E encryption.

A couple of weeks back, WhatsApp and Google signed a deal to no longer count WhatsApp backups in Google Drive’s allocated storage space.

But we know that Google analyzes its users’ Drive accounts for ad-targeting, so it is expected that Google is going to take something (like access to WhatsApp users data) in exchange for storing WhatsApp’s data for free.

According to the new deal, those WhatsApp backups that haven’t been updated in more than one year will also be deleted automatically from Google Drive storage.

To protect your chat backups on Google Drive, you should set up a strong password for the account and enable two-factor authentication option provided by Google.

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