Thomas Fox-Brewster reports:
When the Guardian published a report on an alleged WhatsApp backdoor last week, it elicited both fear of state surveillance and ire from cryptography experts. On Friday, that second group labelled the story needless scaremongering in a letter to the British paper demanding a retraction. Whatever side you stood, there was the begging, unanswered question: just what kind of access does WhatsApp actually grant to the government?
According to court filings reviewed by your reporter over recent months, there’s little indication WhatsApp has ever handed message content to the cops. But it has given plenty of other revealing data to the FBI on multiple occasions. Mostly it’s metadata showing which numbers contacted which over WhatsApp, when, and for how long, as well as the IP addresses and phone identifiers associated with the subpoenaed accounts. Location and contacts data may also be accessible to police when they come knocking on WhatsApp’s Mountain View doors.
Read more on Forbes.
h/t, Joe Cadillic