EFF report slams WhatsApp over user government snooping stance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released the latest version of its 'Who Has Your Back?' report and accompanying infographic, and it makes for interesting reading. Once you appreciate that what the EFF is talking about here is how good, measured as a response to a handful of yes or no questions, a bunch of leading tech companies are at protecting our data from government snooping requests. It's not about privacy in the larger scheme of things, just from that particular angle. That said, let's look at how the EFF came to the conclusions that can be seen in the accompanying graphic. Essentially the organisations concerned were asked, on a yes or no basis remember, if they fulfilled five criteria when it comes to privacy expectations regarding government snooping in the post-Snowden era: follows industry-accepted best practice, informs users about government data access demands, discloses data retention policy, discloses government content removal requests and if it has pro-user public policy which opposes encryption back doors. Here's the broad breakdown.