Maybe your wife had enabled cloud backups?
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
40 points (91.7% liked)
Privacy
50119 readers
862 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I bought a new phone a year ago and lost all my whatsapp messages. Are you sure she didn't simply enable the cloud backups in the settings?
Well, the phone got runover by a car so will never know. But i willcheck current default settings.
As nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de said, maybe your wife had activated backups and you did not have any knowledge of it (and maybe she forgot about enabling it as well)?
But if what you say is true, that sounds horrifying. Meta should get in trouble for this.
I am not surprised. Meta is the company that do not follows the rules and gathers as much data about their users + others outside of their services (mainly thanks to Meta Pixel), as they possibly can. Extremely greedy!
- If you want to switch to a safer place to chat on, switch to Signal.
- If you want more privacy and stability, switch to XMPP and use OMEMO (Signal Protocol).
- If you want maximum privacy, switch to SimpleX.
It wasn’t like that before Meta bought WhatsApp. This is why Signal is the superior app using the protocol; Meta stores not only the conversations, but separately stores the address books and the connection meta data and communication web. The actual messages are at least encrypted, but they’re still sitting there waiting to be accessed by anyone with a key (it doesn’t have to be her key).
sitting there waiting to be accessed by anyone with a key (it doesn’t have to be her key)
wait, what!?
Tldr, closed source software can do closed source software things
The inappropriate jokes that filled my head as I read the title of this post are innumerable.
Also, f*ck Meta.
Edit: is setting up a separate work phone/clients only phone and a private life only phone on the table? :)
Of course these are all options that i will slowly have to convince her are needed.
Cool! One step at a time. Don't give up! xD
https://snee.la/posts/the-workings-of-whatsapps-end-to-end-encrypted-backups/
This is my analysis of WhatsApp's backup mechanisms. The best possible thing you can do from a privacy PoV is to enable end-to-end-encrypted backups, which is disabled by default.
As far as I know, WhatsApp's backups don't go to meta's servers, but instead google cloud / icloud. If your wife logged into her google account before, had backups enabled (frequency is weekly afaik), and signed into the google account again on the new phone - WhatsApp will restore the backups from the cloud.
If you enable E2EE backups, then you'll be asked to enter your password, which only you can have. If you fail to supply that, your backups are lost forever. The implantation is a bit scuffed IMO, but still better than nothing. Things may have changed since I analyzed it in 2022.
Whatsapp tells me every day it's unable to back up my data, and begs me to remedy the issue. Lol, nope!
I reset my phone earlier this year and lost my WhatsApp messages because I didn't have backups turned on. So if they are doing this, it's new in the last few months.
Have you double checked the settings on the account in question?
If she's using GrapheneOS can she at least run Whatsapp in a work profile?
[...] They apper to be stored on Meta servers. [...]
Afaik default behaviour on Android is that it backs up to GDrive by default.
They have always had your keys and as long as its owned by Facebook it had the data stored on their machines
She uses graphene AND whatsapp? This is very confusing.
Well, yes. Not ideal, i understand but surely reduces her exposure surface compared to stock os install from what i've read here and there.