How Signal, WhatsApp, Apple, and Google Handle Encrypted Chat Backups

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Encrypted chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp are one of the best ways to keep your digital conversations as private as possible. But if you’re not careful with how those conversations are backed up, you can accidentally undermine your privacy.

When a conversation is properly encrypted end-to-end, it means that the contents of those messages are only viewable by the sender and the recipient. The organization that runs the messaging platform—such as Meta or Signal—does not have access to the contents of the messages. But it does have access to some metadata, like the who, where, and when of a message. Companies have different retention policies around whether they hold onto that information after the message is sent.

What happens after the messages are sent and received is entirely up to the sender and receiver. If you’re having a conversation with someone, you may choose to screenshot that conversation and save that screenshot to your computer’s desktop or phone’s camera roll. You might choose to back up your chat history, either to your personal computer or maybe even to cloud storage (services like Google Drive or iCloud, or to servers run by the application developer).

Those backups do not necessarily have the same type of encryption protections as the chats themselves, and may make those conversations—which were sent with strong, privacy-protecting end-to-end encryption—available to read by whoever runs the cloud storage platform you’re backing up to, which also means they could hand them at the request of law enforcement.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how several of the most popular chat apps handle backups, and what options you may have to strengthen the security of those backups.

How Signal Handles Backups

The official Signal app doesn’t offer any way to back up your messages to a cloud server (some alternate versions of the app may provide this, but we recommend you avoid those, as there don’t exist any alternatives with the same level of security as the official app). Even if you use a device backup, like Apple’s iCloud backup, the con

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