In this age of technology the biggest threat we all are facing is undoubtedly the loss of valuable personal data. And when a mobile application like WhatsApp which has now become an unavoidable part of all our lives runs into a Security trouble, there is a problem. Technological companies are today rated not only on their quantity, price and other facilities but also importantly on security aspect of the product in question. In Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual report on data collection, top companies like AT&T, Yahoo and WhatsApp have ended up in the last position while Adobe, Dropbox and Apple scored a higher rank.
WhatsApp and AT&T earned one star out of a total of five stars, i.e.
the lowest marks in the report. Verizon Communications, which scored four stars last year, scored only two stars this year. The report by EFF ranks companies based on their data collection habits, data transparency and data retention policies. The organisation while reporting also considers how the companies handle data requests and back door access to consumer data.
This report definitely has put a lot of pressure on the said technological companies to up their game and create a more reliable and transparent procedures of data collection, handling and retention. While this report provides a ranking on security aspects relating to data, technology companies have also themselves started to publish reports showing the number of requests they receive for government agencies and the amount and type of data collected and disclosed.
Amongst all the ones who ranked low, it's disheartening and alerting to see WhatsApp score so low and the more thought worthy aspect is that WhatsApp doesn't publish its own report on the number of government requests it received in a period of time, and does not reveal its data retention policies.
EFF, a non-profit group, began publishing the report in 2011 and in their initial year almost all companies had a low score.
So if we analyse deeply we will find that the companies are actually trying to polish their data security policies. All we can hope is technology companies like WhatsApp take a note of this and improve data security and retention policies.
