According to some confirmed reports, WhatsApp is working on a new security feature to protect its chat backups with passwords and encryption. WABetaInfo, a famous blog that tracks the development of this Facebook-owned messaging app.
They reported that WhatsApp would be rolling out this security feature one year ago, as the work was in progress. Now, recently they have shared some screenshots of the functionality of this feature for Android and iOS.
One of the screenshots mentioned that the user could set a password to encrypt his future chat backups. It will be helpful to prevent unauthorized access to the user's iCloud Drive backup. The users should remember this password, as it would be required again to restoring the chat backups.
WhatsApp will ask the user to confirm the mobile number and select a password that is at least eight characters long. Another screenshot from WABetaInfo mentioned that WhatsApp would not recover the chat backups if the user forgets his password.
As of now, the user can protect WhatsApp with a password lock. It means the chats in his WhatsApp are already encrypted. However, this encryption does not work when the user stores his chat backups online, i.e., on iCloud or Google Drive.
Hence, this new feature will extend the password encryption to the online chat storage as well. Therefore, nobody would be able to access your chat history without your permission. The users are desperately waiting for this new WhatsApp security feature.
These reports will also give some relief to the WhatsApp users as they have become suspicious about WhatsApp security. Hence, this feature will also help WhatsApp to regain the trust of users.
Recently, WhatsApp had faced a lot of criticism because of its recent security update. It claimed that WhatsApp is storing the user information with its parent company – Facebook.
In January 2020, WhatsApp had introduced its new privacy policy, which was mandatory for the users to accept. Moreover, it warned them of terminating the services after 8th Feb 2020 if they fail to accept this policy.
Because of this, WhatsApp faced a lot of heat from the users. Therefore, WhatsApp officials had to clarify on Twitter that they would not be suspending or deleting the user accounts because of this new privacy policy. They also rescheduled their business plans for May 2020.
People had also started moving to the competitor messaging app – Signal. But, WhatsApp is hopeful of winning the users' trust again with this new security feature.
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