14
pda87
7y

In my ongoing quest to un-Google my life, I turned off the Whatsapp chat back up, which uses Google Drive. There's a message in that setting which says, "Media and messages you back up are not protected by Whatsapp end-to-end encryption while in Google drive".
Damn.
All my Whatsapp chats for years have been on Google servers in plaintext.
I assumed it uploaded one massive encrypted archive.

Comments
  • 2
    What? Fuck
  • 5
    @nicogramm I know, wtf. And it got me thinking, even though I've stopped my chats being uploaded, people I chat with are still uploading my portion of our chats to their Google Drive. Damn...
  • 3
    @pda87 I mean not necessarily end to end encryption but like at least symmetric encryption with a passphrase or something. But just nothing? Who thought that this would be a good idea?
  • 3
    @nicogramm I'm really disappointed in this one. I think I'm gonna struggle to explain this one to my friends and family enough to make them care and suddenly switch to Signal.
  • 1
    @pda87 it's a real struggle! Been there! Had to switch back to WhatsApp!!
  • 1
    @badwolf I optimistically installed Signal in the hope that after scanning my contacts, someone might surprise me and already have it installed... Nobody did, of course.
  • 3
    @nicogramm @pda87 I thought that was somewhere in their tos or so. But yup, WhatsApp backups are plaintext.
    Oh and you can't even Google backup signal messages, the app keeps it's contents encrypted and specifically out of online backup thingies like Google drive.
  • 3
    @nicogramm Possibly state pressured into doing it like this? They can easily do it but chose not to. Google is integrated in prism so if any agency can't get to the in transit encrypted WhatsApp messages, they just have to look into people's WhatsApp backups in their Google drives :/
  • 0
    @linuxxx Damn it. I'm gutted about this and was hoping I was wrong. I might just sack all this off and go back to Gmail and Facebook ;)
    How many of your friends and family have you got onto Signal...?
  • 1
    @pda87 About 20 or so I think?
  • 0
    @Jop- True, only you have to make it yourself. Sad that they took it out though :/
  • -1
    Really is this post about privacy and google?
  • 0
    @nicogramm where in the setting does it say that it's plaintext? It just says it's not e2e encryption.
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