The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking aim at Facebook’s (FB) mobile messaging app WhatsApp for not doing enough to safeguard its users’ data from government requests. In this year’s annual ‘Who Has Your Back?’ report, companies like Apple (AAPL), Dropbox, WordPress and Yahoo! (YHOO) received five stars for following industry-accepted best practices, telling its users about government data demands, disclosing policies on data retention and government content removal requests and adopting a pro-user public policy against back doors. However, WhatsApp earned a mere one star in its first year in the report. While WhatsApp gets credit from the EFF for Facebook’s public position against back doors, the foundation said it hasn’t adopted any of the best practices it’s identified in the report. The EFF said, ‘WhatsApp should publicly require a warrant before turning over user content, publish a law enforcement guide and transparency report, have a stronger policy of informing users of government requests, and disclose its data retention policies.’
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