The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published its annual report called ‘Who Has Your Back?’ which analyses the results of a research regarding the privacy of users of apps and services. Quite surprisingly WhatsApp, which is the most popular instant messaging application, ranked as the worst one at each level of measurement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international organization dedicated to the protection of digital rights and each year analyses those kind of data, publishing a report. The main purpose of the EFF is to clarify to users what services and what apps usually used by us better explain what governments want, how they cooperate with those governments and how they respond to their questions.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation compiled a list of 24 companies, and among them just two have received only one star (out of five): WhatsApp and AT&T. But what are the reasons for this terrible result? Mainly: the lacking of a safety report to be produced periodically (at least annually); the absence of specific policies on how to use users data and the difficulty to know how data are stored and in which cases the police has access to them.
Although WhatsApp is now part of the same family of Facebook, the social network owned by Mark Zuckerberg has obtained a completely different ranking, getting 4 stars out of 5, meeting most of the criteria required by EFF experts. So, if Whatsapp ranked as one of the worst, who is the winner?
The companies that fully respect the privacy of their users and that therefore deserved all 5 stars are: Apple, Yahoo, Dropbox, Credo Mobile, Adobe, Wikimedia, Sonic and WordPress.