Pavel Durov again slams WhatsApp encryption, claims most chats end up in Google and Apple backups
Follow UsTelegram CEO Pavel Durov has once again criticised WhatsApp.
Durov said that Meta-owned app’s encryption claim is a 'giant consumer fraud.'
'95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers,' he added.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has once again criticised WhatsApp, saying that Meta-owned app’s encryption claim is a ‘giant consumer fraud.’ In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Durov argued that WhatsApp’s claim of end-to-end encryption does not tell the full story. According to him, a large percentage of private chats are stored in cloud backups by Apple and Google.
SurveyDurov wrote, ‘95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers — not E2E-encrypted. Backup encryption is optional, and few people enable it — let alone use strong passwords.’
He also claimed that even if someone secures their own backups with a strong password, the privacy risk still remains because the people they chat with may not have done the same. So, this could still expose conversations in cloud storage.
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Durov further claimed that Apple and Google hand over backed-up WhatsApp messages to third parties thousands of times each year. He added that Telegram has not ‘disclosed a single byte of users’ messages in its entire 12+ year history.’
This is not the first time Durov has criticised the Meta-owned messaging service. Last week, he claimed that WhatsApp’s encryption system might be ‘the biggest consumer fraud in history,’ accusing the platform of misleading billions of users about how private their messages really are.
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Even Elon Musk posted last week that you ‘can’t trust WhatsApp,’ and encouraged users to try X Chat for communication, which he said offers ‘actual privacy.’
However, WhatsApp has strongly denied these accusations. The company said the claims are ‘false and absurd,’ adding ‘WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade so your messages cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and recipient.’
