The messaging app is a great ally for everyday life, but there are some practices that put the security of your account at risk
Whatsapp continues to be one of the most widely used messaging apps in the world. Although the competition from Telegram and Signal is increasingly fierce, the Menlo Park team is constantly working to try to keep up with the news and offer us many new features to use every year. In 2021, it was the turn of self-destructing chats, speeded-up audio notes, and many other new features that made the app even more functional and practical to use for work or private life. But precisely because we use Whatsapp in every aspect of our daily lives, it is good to keep under control some practices that could backfire on you in case of abuse or forgetfulness.
Here are the 5 things you should never do on Whatsapp
Set up automatic media downloads
If you don’t have a good data subscription or a lot of space on your phone, this is the first big mistake you can make. The videos, photos, and audios you receive from WhatsApp can consume a huge amount of data and storage space, so you could suddenly find yourself with no memory without even realizing it – not to mention the hundreds of useless photos you’d download to the gallery. Just go to Settings, Data & Storage, and take off the Auto-Download.
Open links that come to you in chat
Never do this, you may put your phone’s security at risk. If clicking on a link from an unknown user would be madness – and in fact almost no one does, fortunately – doing so on content from friends and family is a much more common practice. Yet the phenomenon of social hacking is now a reality and you have to take it into account to avoid problems: before clicking on any link on Whatsapp, you have to be sure that that link really came from the sender of the message. So write or call them to make sure you don’t have spam, viruses or compromising your account. And then enable two-step verification so you’re more secure.
Send photos or sensitive data
If conversations are practically inaccessible outside of your device thanks to end-to-end encryption, the same cannot be said for data saved on Google Drive or iCloud that are (theoretically) accessible from the outside. Creating a backup of your data on these external services can be the key to accessing your shared chat information, since, so far, these external backups are not protected by the same encryption as chats. On the other hand, Whatsapp does it to make things easier for us: creating a history is the best solution for those who want to change phones and don’t want to lose their conversations – even more so now that you can transfer data from Android to iOS and vice versa. But as long as the app does not guarantee the same level of security on this front as well, it is good to be careful about what you share so as not to risk a data leak and find it shared on the Net.
Disable automatic backup
Despite the above, disabling automatic backup is pretty much suicide. If you lose your phone or forget to save your data in the new one, you risk erasing years of chats and conversations in the blink of an eye. Instead, you just need to authorize autosave to always have a backup of your data available.
Use Whatsapp Web on any PC
Right now that Whatsapp has made multi-device compatibility available for the use of a profile – a maximum of 4 devices, including only one smartphone at a time – we must pay particular attention to the accesses made with Whatsapp Web, since once the login with the control code on the smartphone has been authorized, it will be sufficient to open the app again from the computer to be able to spy on us remotely without our knowledge. Think about when you’ve connected to a friend’s laptop or partner’s computer: you’ve closed the application window, but you’re sure you’ve logged out correctly? When you close the app from your computer, Whatsapp does not notify you that it is keeping the connection open, so the risk is that someone else can open the application and access your conversations.