This favourite messenger app of many is not safe enough

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) annual report recently gave the lowest rating to WhatsApp for offering less privacy protection to its users.

The messenger app which is liked by many may not be one of the best options to communicate as it does not offer enough protection to its users, says The Telegraph.

Despite an end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp has earned a rating of two stars in the annual report of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, added the report.

The EFF report gave a low score to the app claiming that it does not explicitly rule out data being used for surveillance purposes. The app does not request judicial reviews of national security letters demanding information, added the newspaper report.

Internet privacy campaigners claim that WhatsApp, owned by Facebook Inc., has not taken sufficient measures to protect its users’ data from government and has been unable to control messages sent by criminals, the report said.

The EFF’s annual report is based on how companies deal with government regulations on its users’ data. The ratings of the companies ranging from 0 to 5 stars are decided on several factors including whether the users were informed about the government requests.

Facebook rolled out end-to-end encryption to WhatsApp, with over 1 billion users that it acquired in October 2014. While WhatsApp messages have default encryption, Facebook messenger users must turn on the feature to get the extra additional security protection, which scrambles communications so they can only be read on devices at either end of a conversation, said a Reuters report.