I'm in two minds about this one. I'm not really a fan of Google but realistically we're talking about backing up messages from a Facebook app. It is also possible to opt out and I know non technical people who have done so on the basis they don't want "more Google".
And in terms of the grandparent's point about the public not being notified for 5 years, perhaps not by Google is accurate, though it was raised by Telegram's founder in response to Snowden's recommendation of WA back in 2016 [1] and covered elsewhere [2]. Snowden was rather dismissive of the relevant point about this, which always puzzled me.
[1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/778618631060066304
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170729003715/https://www.makeu...
Why can't they just encrypt the data?! It makes no sense. I manually back up my messages because of this. After some time WhatsApp will start nagging me to enable cloud backups. I suppose this fits into the "annoy users until they give up their privacy" theme in the litigation document.
Yes. I have a YubiKey I could use for this.
How would you make a backup end-to-end encrypted without asking for a passphrase or relying on on device storage? I don't think its technically possible.
Maybe google could have tied it to your login credentials, but then no more password resets.
WhatsApp blog post on encrypted backups: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/end-to-end-encrypted-backu...
Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you targeted ads? That would be a big breach in trust.
Is there any reason to believe they're not doing that? It's already a known fact that they scan files for malware and other illegal files such as CSAM. WhatsApp backup contents are a gold mine of personal information.
> We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.
Remember when Google was working on the DoD’s autonomous murder drone project?
Isn’t WA the predominant means of text communication for people who travel abroad regularly?
They did just a demo, Amazon and Microsoft are the biggest contractors in that space. News media loves to shit on Google in these scenarios but most of it is just Google trying to take a pie of markets others are already in. So all these articles just amounts to Google becoming as evil as the other tech giants.
For example, we know Microsoft takes on these DoD AI projects. Maybe the VSCode telemetry is used to help them make murder drones? We also know Microsoft collaborates with CCP to operate its bing search in China. Maybe they hand over the VSCode telemetry to CCP? People don't ask those questions about Microsoft, so why ask them about Google?
If you did miss that time because it's outside of your time in the tech world, the difference here is that Microsoft never claimed to be anything but a B2B software dealer with a passing fascination with extending its monopoly to the consumer markets. It tried cable TV boxes, phones, and all sorts of other hare brained ideas but the Xbox was the only one that really stuck.
Google PR image'd itself as the anti-Microsoft. No feature creep, just a plain white page that showed you what you wanted to find. Features in the core search product were subtle and generally high on usefulness and low on intrusiveness. Even the Google ad business was marketed as the acceptable compromise between the brain-melting strobe light ads of the late 90s and the word-based ads that people would not object to.
tl;dr: Google had to work at burning all of its bridges.
> In addition, the Google Drive website, the Google Drive mobile application, and the Google Drive Terms and Privacy policy all failed to disclose to users that Google as a third party had access to their WhatsApp communications. The Google Drive terms of service at the time even permitted Google the ability to use its access to users’ private WhatsApp communications in Google Drive to sell advertising.
The last sentence suggests that yes, Google could have analyzed your uploads to serve you targeted ads.