Can you explain how that's any different from "granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files."?
- if the messages are shared, google has access to private information they were never explicitly granted access to.
- if an encrypted tar ball is shared, google has access to nothing but a blob of unreadable data.
Isn’t this obvious?
> Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.
https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/about-google-drive-ba...
While enabling Drive backups is something that the user has to enable manually, I'm not sure the complete consequences of doing so are really communicated to the user. I wouldn't expect Google having an agreement bypass to access my messages even if Drive backup was enabled, but that's exactly what happens, if I understand it correctly.
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
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.
> 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.
This has already been debunked as bullshit. What the lawsuit is referring to is just WhatsApp adding the option of backing up your chat history to Google Drive on android devices.