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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I forget if its WhatsApp that technically lets you sync chats in unencrypted form to iCloud which is the “loophole” around this, though you can lockdown your iCloud even tighter, not sure it Apple can do much if you fully lock down your iCloud, not sure if this has been legally tested? Its not a very advertised feature its just a setting.

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WhatsApp iPhone syncs to iCloud unencrypted by default[1].

iMessage also syncs to iCloud unencrypted by default[2].

[1] Depends on you paying for iCloud storage, so that you have space for a full phone backup to occur.

[2] Might be "free" with "iMessage in iCloud", an option to enable separately.

> WhatsApp iPhone syncs to iCloud unencrypted by default[1].

Not true. You must choose to enable it or not when you set up new phone. On mine it does not back up

If you must "choose to enable" encryption, that implies it's off by default. If so, GP's statement is accurate.

No, I mean you must select yes or no. can't use WhatsApp until you make a choice yourself.

Choose to enable backups.

The Android version syncs all your chat logs to Google Drive without encryption by default. That's the backdoor.

Right now it got a switch to enable e2e for backups, but yeah I think default backup is probably a workaround...

iCloud backups are encrypted, and can be end-to-end encrypted.

Also, backups have nothing to do with the messages being end-to-end encrypted. Like if you don't use a passcode on the phone, the messages are still encrypted.

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