Social networking sites usually express how serious they are when it comes to securing the data of their user since it might lead them not to trust them, hence moving on to other alternatives.
However, there are organizations that compare how these companies are protecting their user’s data from being pried on by third parties and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of them.
According to their report, they ranked how user data is handled by these companies in the US. They graded the companies whether they follow industry wide best practices, tells users about government data requests, promises not to sell out users, stands to NSL gag orders and pro-user public policy.
Companies like Adobe, Credo Mobile, Lyft, Pinterest, Dropbox, Sonic, Uber, Wickr and WordPress scored perfect marks (a star in each category). Others like Apple, Facebook, Linked In, Microsoft and Yahoo got 4 out of 5 stars.
However, a company like WhatsApp only got 2 stars out of a possible 5, where they failed to tell users about government requests, promising not to sell out users and dont stand up to NSL gag orders. Companies that did worse than WhatsApp are T-Mobile, Verizon, AT7T and Comcast (see the trend?)
WhatsApp is an incredibly popular messaging service that is used by over 1.2 billion users worldwide. This means a huge percentage of the world’s population share between each other a lot of information and and it is a potential goldmine for people who would want to know what these people are talking about.
Well, this does not look good for WhatsApp and although they have security features like two factor authentication.
