Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp on Friday said it would extend encryption on the messaging service to backups of chats shared on the platform when they are stored on Apple Inc. and Google’s cloud services.
The new offering gives WhatsApp’s two billion users additional protections for their communications, an escalation in a growing fight over encryption technology. Companies developing privacy-preserving technologies continue to be at odds with law-enforcement organizations that want access to the vast array of digital information stored on smartphones and on computer servers known as the cloud.
