Backups: The Weak Link in Your “Private” Messages

Encrypted messaging apps love to parade around in privacy circles. The promise is simple: your messages are yours and yours alone. End-to-end encryption, they say, ensures that only you and the person you’re messaging can read what’s said.

And this is all true.

But that promise could melt the moment your messages are whisked away from your phone and handed over to a cloud backup service. That’s where the fantasy ends and the fine print takes over.

Cloud backups, iCloud, Google Drive, or whatever trendy storage solution the tech giants are pushing this quarter, aren’t always covered by the same encryption rules, and when they are it’s only with a promise. Once your messages get swept up into those backups, their security becomes more theoretical than practical.

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