Why You Should Encrypt Your WhatsApp Backups to ICloud
With over two billion active users, WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world and also one of the few that offers end-to-end encryption by default. This means that no one but you, the other side, can read your conversations. Even WhatsApp can’t read your conversations because it doesn’t have a key to decrypt your chats.
This was all true except for one scenario: All WhatsApp chats backed up to iCloud were unencrypted, so if someone accessed your iCloud backup, they could read all of your messages quite easily. But now WhatsApp has an additional feature to protect your WhatsApp backups with the same two-factor authentication using a password or secure key.
How to enable end-to-end encryption for WhatsApp backups via iCloud
Before we start, you should know that WhatsApp end-to-end encryption relies on a password or 64-digit security key. If you lose your password, you won’t be able to recover your chats, so make sure you use a strong but recognizable password. If you’re using something tricky, be sure to save it in your password manager (it could be iCloud Keychain or a third-party service like Bitwarden ).
First, update your WhatsApp app to the latest version. WhatsApp is gradually rolling out this feature to its 2 billion users, so if you don’t see it yet, please try again in a couple of days.
Open WhatsApp and go to Chats under the Settings tab. Here select ” Chat backup ” and click the ” End-to-end encrypted backup ” button. Click the ” Enable ” button and on the next screen select the ” Create password ” option.
Here, create a password that is at least six characters and one letter. Then click the Next button.
Once everything is set up, click the Create button to switch to end-to-end encrypted backup. Give WhatsApp time to switch to an encrypted backup.
If you want to disable this feature, go back to Settings > Chats > Chat Backup > Encrypted End-to-End Backup > Disable .
Although WhatsApp switched to encrypted backups, your iPhone still backs up all iPhone data to iCloud in the same unencrypted format. For security reasons, we suggest that you turn off iCloud backup completely. To do this, open the app “Settings” and click on the banner on top of their profile. Then go to ” iCloud ” and turn off the ” iCloud Backup ” option.