The Electronic Frontier Foundation has blasted WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app bought by Facebook last year, for not requiring a warrant from governments seeking user information, for not disclosing its policies on turning over data, and for other issues.
The criticism was in an annual report evaluating how well internet companies safeguard their users’ data against government snooping.
In the fifth annual Who Has Your Back report, the EFF said WhatsApp “has adopted none of the best practices we’ve identified.”
This was the first year the EFF covered the app, which says it has grown to 800 million monthly active users.
WhatsApp and Facebook, which bought the app in 2014 for $US22 billion, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The non-profit EFF, with the mission of “defending civil liberties in the digital world,” graded social media platforms, telecom firms and other internet companies on how they handled government requests for data according to five criteria, awarding a star for each:
* Adopting industry-accepted best practices;
* Disclosing data retention policies;
* Disclosing government data requests;
* Disclosing governments’ content-removal requests;
* Opposing requests for “backdoor” vulnerabilities governments could access.
The report gave WhatsApp credit only for the last criterion, and the EFF praised Facebook for that: “WhatsApp does get credit for Facebook’s public position opposing back doors, and we commend Facebook for that.”
Facebook itself scored well in the report, earning four out of five stars.
But the EFF also said it had been reporting for a year on Facebook’s cooperation with US prisons to block prisoners’ access to the social network.
“Facebook had even set up a dedicated ‘Inmate Account Takedown Request’ form to help prison officials quickly and easily flag prisoner-run accounts for suspension, even when the accounts did not violate any of Facebook’s terms of service,” the EFF wrote.
The report noted progress overall.
“Over the course of those first four reports, we watched a transformation take place among the practices of major technology companies,” it said.
“We’re proud of the role our annual report played.”
Several companies received the highest, five-star rating including Adobe Systems, Apple, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Sonic.net, the Wikimedia Foundation, WordPress and Yahoo.
The US telco AT&T received the only other one-star rating, earning recognition only for adopting basic industry standards.
AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
