Facebook-owned instant-messaging app WhatsApp has announced that it has completed building end-to-end encrypted chat backups and will soon begin rolling out this extra layer of privacy and security protection to the users.
The company has claimed that with end-to-end encrypted chat backups, no other messaging service at WhatsApp’s scale will provide this level of security for people’s messages.
WhatsApp messages are already end-to-end encrypted which means no third party can access them, not even WhatsApp.
Many users like to store their chats in backups to preserve them and restore them when they switch devices or in case it gets deleted. However, till now chat backups were unencrypted, and thus vulnerable to being accessible.
The app will be adding support for this new end-to-end encrypted chat backups in the coming weeks as an additional layer of security for those who want it.
“In the coming weeks, we will be adding end-to-end encrypted backups as an additional layer of security for those who want it,” the company added.
So, if someone chooses to back up their chat history with end-to-end encryption, it will be accessible only to them, and no third party can unlock their backup, not even WhatsApp.
The company released a statement regarding the availability of this feature that reads, “We are announcing this now to provide the broader technical community with our approach before it’s available to our beta testers and eventually everyday users.”
“This is a really big privacy advancement, particularly at our scale of more than 2 billion users who send more than 100 billion messages a day. We believe that this will give our users a meaningful advancement in the safety of their personal messages,” the company added.
The company will be releasing this as an optional feature and in the coming weeks it will be rolling this out to iOS and Android users.
Apart from this, WhatsApp is reportedly working on other new features too.
As per recent reports, WhatsApp is working on a new user that will soon allow users to hide their online status from anyone who can’t be trusted.
(with inputs from IANS)
