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WhatsApp's new encryption option can be found in the settings under “Chats” and the menu item “Chat backup”
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If you lose your smartphone, you will only get your WhatsApp messages back if there is a backup.
The problem: If you didn't want to save your chat histories individually as ZIP files on your computer, you could alternatively only save your chats unencrypted in the cloud.
That should change now.
WhatsApp users can now secure their backups with encryption that even WhatsApp cannot bypass. The parent company Facebook announced on Thursday in a blog post. The message states: "Neither WhatsApp nor your backup provider can read your backups or access the key required for unlocking." Encryption secured as long as they have been sent from one device to another.
Anyone who saved their chats in an online backup in the iCloud or on Google Drive stored their data there unencrypted.
It was the easiest way for law enforcement authorities to access the content - provided they were able to submit a court order, especially since some users might not even have realized that they had activated automatic, unencrypted backups.
In future, WhatsApp will require a 64-digit key to load the backup into the network and back onto the phone.
You have to enter this code manually.
Therefore, users can also set up a password, which in turn fetches the 64-digit key from a virtual safe and sends it off.
The secure backup function was not yet available to everyone on Friday morning. In the apps for iOS and Android, the message was displayed that the chats "are not secured with WhatsApp end-to-end encryption". A password is also not requested. How long the users will have to be patient is unclear. In response to a request from SPIEGEL, a Facebook spokesman referred to the statement by WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart, who tweeted on Thursday that it is taking it slowly to get it right, because it knows how important backups are to people. But they are working “hard to distribute the function to everyone as quickly as possible”.
The backup function can be found in the settings under »Chats« and the menu item »Chat backup«.
There, users can choose whether a backup should be created at all and whether the automatic backup should be uploaded every day, weekly or monthly.
Videos sent as files can be unchecked so that the backup copy in the cloud does not become too large.
Telegram only encrypts when explicitly requested
With around two billion WhatsApp users and around 100 billion short messages sent daily, WhatsApp is the most popular messenger service - and much more secure than Telegram.
Anyone who does not explicitly start a "secret chat" there must forego end-to-end encryption when chatting.
The messages are all backed up in the cloud.
The problem: The code is not completely visible, so you have to trust that the messages are properly encrypted.
Secure alternatives such as Signal and Threema also rely on strong encryption and have an advantage over WhatsApp: significantly less metadata is collected there.
WhatsApp transmits at least the telephone number and the device ID to Facebook, but is not allowed to use the data for advertising purposes in Germany.