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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

As a disclaimer, I work at Google but have no hidden insights here

I haven't used Whatsapp but I would imagine that exporting your data to Drive is an activity that doesn't happen unless the user initiates it. I find manual backups to be a lot less insidious than the implication that Facebook has built a backdoor for Google that breaks Whatsapp's end to end encryption

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"I find manual backups to be a lot less insidious than the implication that Facebook has built a backdoor for Google that breaks Whatsapp's end to end encryption"

If the backup process makes it crystal clear to the user that by making the backup Google will be able to read the user's messages, then it's fine.

Otherwise the users might mistakenly think their messages are still private.

Backups are automatic, but opt-in. Unfortunately, you cant opt-out from your contacts saving your shared chat history AFAIK, so even if you dont use backups, there may be an unencrypted copy of your messages anyway.

yep, chances are that most whatsapp groups contain at least one person the uses the google drive backup.

True, users have to enable Google Drive backups, but they are tied to the user's phone number and

> WhatsApp backups no longer count against your Google Drive storage quota

So I imagine there is some kind of (paid?) agreement between FB and Google to keep them free.

I don't doubt that the content of the messages stays secret, but there is a lot of metadata that can be inferred by simply tying a phone number and the size of the backup (and deltas) to a user's email.

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