WhatsApp, was tested by a San Francisco based organisation faces a major drawback in maintaining its privacy policy. The Facebook only owned messaging app was tested in Electronic freedom foundation's contest called Who's got your back?
The main criteria of the contest are
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The main criteria of the contest are
as follows:
- Follows industry-accepted best practices
- Tells users about government data demands
- Discloses policies on data retention
- Discloses government content removal requests
- Pro-user public policy: opposes backdoors.
In this contest WhatsApp is the only one to receive 1 star.
The contest reveals that WhatsApp does not require a warrant before it provides content to law enforcement agencies and does not publish a transparency report, like so many other companies do.
WhatsApp also does not promise that users will receive advance notice about government data demands, and the report goes on to criticise the company as it does not publish any information on data retention policies or content removal requests.
The only area where WhatsApp gets some credit comes from Facebook’s public policy of opposing including backdoors that can be exploited by government agencies.
Apple, Dropbox tops the list with five stars. Search giant Google is left back with Three stars.
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