According to the latest annual scorecard ‘Who has your back?’ of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization, Whatsapp and US service provider AT&T are ranked poor in protecting users’ privacy. Both received one star out of the five listed.
Whatsapp received its single score for its pro-user public policy, which opposes backdoors. However, other major factors like following industry accepted practices, reveal users about Government data demands, disclosing policies on data retention and data on Government content removal requests are registered nil.
AT&T received its sole scoring for industry accepted best practices. Verizon is another service provider ranks low, with two stars on the scoreboard.
Certain companies like Adobe, Apple, Credo, Dropbox, Sonic, Wickr, Wikimedia, Wordpress.com and Yahoo received all five stars on the scorecard. The five stars indicate that these companies adopt the best industry practices and will stand by its users when Government misuses privacy means.
US Government is already blamed for its surveillance policies. Technology companies should stand united to fight back the overboard government requests.
