WhatsApp has over 2 billion active users worldwide every month, a number unmatched by any other messaging platform, and one that has been growing steadily for many months now. For more than half of the 2 billion users, the WhatsApp company offers the option of backing up data, in the case of Android in Google's Google Drive, and in the case of iPhone in Apple's iCloud, the solutions being different.
WhatsApp is named in a lawsuit opened by US federal prosecutors against Google, who say that through Google Drive backups, the company would have accessed millions of user messages. The prosecutors say that Facebook and Google would have reached a secret agreement for access to these messages and pictures from WhatsApp, something that no one thought could be possible, agreements of this difficulty are not often met on such a scale.
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WhatsApp sends encrypted backups to Google Drive, but both Facebook and Google clearly say that there the files are not stored in encrypted format, and this mainly to provide data in the criminal investigations of the authorities. Both companies have denied the existence of any agreement for Google to access the data of WhatsApp users, so no one knows clearly what the federal prosecutors are referring to with these very, very serious accusations.
WhatsApp encrypts all users' messages both when they are sent and when they are received, in the users' phones, so in theory Facebook would not have access to people's messages and photos, implicitly neither would Google. Taking them from the backups made in Google Drive would be the only solution for accessing them, if we were to believe these accusations, but they are quite improbable, even if WhatsApp is so popular all over the world.
WhatsApp it is no longer a target of those from Google, who no longer place so much emphasis on their own messaging networks, so that a possible agreement with Facebook to take over people's data seems improbable.
