Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has today announced that WhatsApp now supports end-to-end encryption for chat backups people choose to store in iCloud or Google Drive. He continued that these backups will only be accessible by the user.
“For those curious about how we made this work, we’ve published a white paper and engineering blog with all the technical details for the security community to check out,” Zuckerberg added in a comment on his original Facebook post.
“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. 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 social media giant further said that it is a really big privacy advancement, particularly with a scale of more than 2 billion users sending more than 100 billion messages a day.
WhatsApp says the optional feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks for both iOS and Android devices.
