The WhatsApp messenger is the worst of all protects the personal data of the users, suggests a report from the human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. It is best to deal with it Uber and Adobe.
The experts of the nonprofit organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) came to the conclusion that the leadership of WhatsApp “apply enough effort” to protect the privacy of users.
In its annual study analyzed the EFF open data and assessed the most popular services on a scale from zero to five. When setting the rating of the experts was based on several criteria: a ban on the transfer of personal data to third parties, the transparency of interaction with government, checking on the legality of the secret requests the U.S. Government and advocating for change in the “section 702” of the FISA law, allowing widespread surveillance of citizens. For compliance with each criterion of the company is awarded “Zvezda”, so maximum it could score five “stars”.
The highest score received cloud storage Dropbox, Adobe, WordPress, and services to call a taxi, Uber and Lyft. The worst ratings were awarded Tumblr, Twitter, Airbnb and WhatsApp. And if the first three service earned three points, the messenger got only two.
Experts say that the administration WhatsApp does not protect users from submitting confidential data to third parties does not inform them about the queries from the authorities and does not check the legality of secret requests from U.S. intelligence.
Although all of the correspondence in the messenger is encrypted using the encryption service provider collects metadata, which contains information about the type of device being viewed through the web pages and the mobile network, which is tied to the user number. All this information is passed to the authorities upon request, the researchers said.
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft did not get one “star” in a paragraph about NSL requests. Apple lost one point for the lack of a public campaign against the “section 702”.
