WhatsApp has recently brought many new features in a renewed push to reach Telegram. In the last month alone, the Facebook-owned company has added new options for sending high-quality photos and videos, multi-device support, a new call UI for group calls, and much more.
WhatsApp also recently began testing end-to-end encryption for cloud backups and are now preparing to expand it to local backups. Although WhatsApp has been offering end-to-end encryption for chats since 2014, both cloud backups and local chat backups were exempt. That finally changed when WhatsApp began testing end-to-end encryption support for backups stored on Google Drive and iCloud. Now, WABetainfo reports that WhatsApp is trying to apply the same level of encryption to locally stored backups.
End-to-end encryption will prevent unauthorized access to chat history and multimedia content. WhatsApp will ask you to set a password to encrypt the cloud and local backups, and can also generate a 64-bit encryption key instead of a password.