Do not lose your phone.

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Here we go again. Elon Musk’s XChat is coming soon. which means his regular spat with WhatsApp is here again. “Can’t trust WhatsApp,” Musk posted this week, sharing a post claiming “WhatsApp’s ‘end-to-end encrypted’ privacy is a total lie.”

The original post referenced an ongoing lawsuit alleging the Meta chat platform has accessed private messages, which has been completely denied by WhatsApp.

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But the aftermath of that exchange actually led to something with much more substance. Cloud backups have long been a security and privacy vulnerability for all secure messaging apps that allow them. But WhatsApp has just said that most chats are not properly backed up at all. If you lose your phone, you lose everything.

While WhatsApp offers its own secure backups for Android and iPhone users, if you include your chats within Apple’s or Google’s general device backups to their cloud platforms, then those chats are not secured by WhatsApp.

Per another XChat-linked post, “that means almost every conversation you have still ends up sitting in a cloud backup controlled by big tech — fully accessible to Apple and Google and anyone they share it with.”

WhatsApp responded to this one. “This is misleading fear-mongering. Backups are off by default and most people don’t even use them. If you do back up your messages, you can encrypt them with a passkey or pin. Whichever you choose, we still can’t read your messages.”

If you don’t enable secure WhatsApp backups in Chats > Chat Backup, or include WhatsApp in your general device backup, then you start afresh if you lose your phone. You also lose messages, photos, videos and anything else in your chats.

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The recommended option is to use WhatsApp’s own solution, securing those backups with a password or passkey to protect your chat database. Be warned though, your chats can also be backed up by those you chat with, and you have no visibility or control over those backups. Cue disappearing messages.

WhatsApp’s claim that “most” of its 3 billion users don’t back up chats is surprising. I’m not sure how that assessment applies to Apple and Google backups as well as its own, or where the visibility of those stats would come from. But taken at face value, this is a warning for most of WhatsApp’s 3 billion users — do not lose your phone.