On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit defending individual privacy rights online, issued their annual “Who Has Your Back?” report, ranking technology companies based on their policies of protecting users against government surveillance. As stated in the report, the EFF seeks to identify “Which companies will stand by users, insisting on transparency and strong legal standards around government access to user data? And which companies make those policies public, letting the world—and their own users—judge their stances on standing up for privacy rights?”

The report ranks companies based on five criteria: industry-accepted best practices, informing users about government data requests, public disclosure of data retention policies, public disclosure of government removal requests (of content or user accounts) and a category for the company’s public opposition to government surveillance. 

Among the companies that received all five possible stars for 2015 were Adobe, Apple, and Dropbox while WhatsApp, an instant messaging app for smartphones, received one of the lowest reviews, a single star. In April 2015, the WhatsApp instant messaging app reached 800 million active users. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2014, though its parent company received four out of the possible five stars in the same report. 

WhatsApp received the low score as it did not institute industry-accepted best practices by publicly requiring a warrant before providing access to law enforcement officials, failed to inform users about government data requests, and did not disclose its data retention policies nor government removal requests. It’s only star, received for a public denouncement of government surveillance, came as a result of its parent company Facebook’s statements opposing deliberate security weakness in data protection mechanisms to facilitate government surveillance. 

In contrast to WhatsApp’s failed public disclosure of user data policies, Twitter (four out of five stars) publishes a bi-annual Transparency Report documenting information and removal requests, as well as copyright claims made against Twitter users. Twitter even provides an interactive map documenting government data requests: in the latter half of 2014, Twitter received 1622 information requests from the U.S government and complied with 80% of them; in contrast, it received 108 requests from the Russian government and complied with 0%.