Well, we know Europe’s GDPR law will affect on May 25 and according to the law, the online services need to provide the data download option. We already saw that the Instagram enabled such kind of feature with the introduction of ‘Download Data Tool‘, and now WhatsApp is all set to roll out such feature which will allow users to download the account information.
The developers of WhatsApp has updated the beta version of the instant messaging application and with the latest update v2.18.128 on Android. With the update, it has a new feature called ‘Request account info’, it will allow users to download a report of their account information and settings which includes profile photo as well as group names.
How to download your account information
You can download the report of your account by heading over to Settings > Account > Request account info, and then tap on ‘Request report‘. In this way, you can able to send your request to WhatsApp to allow you to download your account information. According to the WhatsApp, it can take up to three days to make your report ready to download, and once it’s available for download, you have a “few weeks” to download your report.
Once request sent, then WhatsApp will show you the day till when the report will be ready for the download, and when the report is ready for the download you will get a notification. And you will also see how much time you have to download your report before it deleted from the servers of WhatsApp.
Once the report is ready to download, you need to tap on the ‘Download report’ option in the ‘Request account info’ section. The file will be in a ZIP format which will include HTML file for easy viewing, and a JSON file if you like to port to a different app.
What kind of information will get?
The report will have information such as phone number, WhatsApp contacts, profile photo, group names, and more, it will not include the messages, because they are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be viewed by even WhatsApp.
Having said that, you cannot able to cancel the request which you have sent but you can cancel by deleting your account or change the WhatsApp number while the request is in pending. So, if you want to backup your account information then update the beta version or join the WhatsApp beta and download your report.
