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Web users’ online rights are on the decline worldwide as governments target messaging apps:

Internet freedom declined for the sixth year in a row, the pro-democracy think tank’s “Freedom on the Net”  report shows. The report looks at online access, censorship and surveillance in 65 countries around the world.

“In a new development, the most routinely targeted tools this year were instant messaging and calling platforms, with restrictions often imposed during times of protests or due to national security concerns,” the report says.

Twenty-four countries restricted access to social media platforms and communication tools between June 1, 2015, and May 31, 2016, according to the report — up from the 15 countries that Freedom House identified the previous year.

Germany orders Facebook to stop sharing and delete WhatsApp user data:

Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner of Hamburg, where Facebook Germany is headquartered, said Tuesday there was no legal basis for Facebook to use WhatsApp’s user information.

“Facebook and WhatsApp are independent companies that process their user’s data on the basis of their own terms and conditions and data privacy policies. After the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook two years ago, both parties have publicly assured that data will not be shared between them. The fact that this is now happening is not only a misleading of their users and the public, but also constitutes an infringement of national data protection law,” said Caspar in a statement, adding that “It has to be [users’] decision as to whether they want to connect their account with Facebook. Therefore, Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance. This has not happened.”

EU to crack down on online services such as WhatsApp over privacy:

WhatsApp, Skype and other online messaging services face an EU crackdown aimed at safeguarding users’ privacy, in a move that highlights the gulf between Europe and the US in regulating the internet.

Your deleted WhatsApp messages might not be as ‘deleted’ as you thought:

WhatsApp brought you the two-tick (so you can’t hide the fact that you’ve received a message) and then the blue ticks (so you can’t hide the fact that you’ve read a message).

In April - despite much controversy following the San Bernadino attack, in which the FBI had paid almost £1 million to unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters - WhatsApp went ahead with end-to-end encryption.

This means that while you can’t hide your ghosting antics from the person in question, you can hide your messages from third parties.

But according to a new blog post by Jonathan Zdziarski, who specialises in Apple software, an iOS device might actually still store your “deleted” messages.

So, Turns Out WhatsApp Chats Stay Even if You Delete Them:

While WhatsApp rightly deserves praise for implementing end-to-end chat encryption earlier this year, forensic security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has made the troubling discovery that your chat records remain in the database, regardless of whether you delete or archive them. Zdziarski notes that this isn’t malicious on WhatsApp’s part, or even intentional. While it deletes the record of a chat, it still leaves “a forensic artifact that can be recovered and reconstructed back into its original form.”

The only way to make sure your chats are officially gone? For now, delete the app entirely.

Brazilian court freezes $6m of Facebook’s money during WhatsApp encryption case:

Brazil’s federal police said WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook , has defied repeated orders to turn over messages sent and received by suspected members of an international cocaine smuggling ring that has been under investigation since January.

Without the data, police said, it will be difficult or impossible to prove links between those captured in recent raids and their confederates in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Spain, the news site G1 reported.

However, the problem for police is this: WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the company has no access to the messages and pictures its users send each other, and so could not possibly comply with the order even if it wanted to.