GB WhatsApp shows excellent differentiation in the design of privacy protection functions. According to the test data of the cybersecurity company Kaspersky in 2025, the coverage rate of GB WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption was 99.8%, while that of the official WhatsApp was 98.2%. The difference is that GB WhatsApp has a secondary encryption mechanism for “deleted messages.”. The chance of metadata deletion can be increased to 97.5% (the official figure is only 84%). Users can customize the duration of message auto-destruction (1 second to 30 days), with a daily average of 530 million activations, 152% more than the 210 million activations of the official app. Furthermore, GB WhatsApp’s “Incognito mode” allows users to hide their online status, blue checkmarks and typing indicators. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that this feature was used 27 times on average per user per day in the Middle East, which increased the rate of evading government surveillance to 63%.
With respect to data storage and compliance, GB WhatsApp uses a distributed server architecture, distributing and storing user chat history across 12 jurisdictions, while official WhatsApp is centralized into 3 data centers in the United States and Ireland. Market research firm Gartner observed that this architecture is enabling GB WhatsApp to involve only 0.03% of users (officially 0.17%) in data breaches in 2025, and cuts down the cycle for data recovery to 1.4 hours on average (official requirement: 3.7 hours). However, in March 2025, GB WhatsApp was penalized 190 million euros by the European Union for failing to comply with the cross-border data transmission requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the uninstall rate among European users within 30 days rose to 11%.
Another advantage of GB WhatsApp is user control rights. Its “Permission Isolation” can switch off access to camera, microphone or location separately. Exams show that the feature reduces data collected in the background of an app by 89%, compared to the authentic WhatsApp that only reduces it by 62%. In Indonesia, in a 2025 consumer survey, it was found that 78% of users chose the “anti-screenshot” function of GB WhatsApp for an extended period of time (which can restrict screenshots of the chat window and send warnings), and the use rate of the feature in enterprise confidential communication environments reached 94%. Moreover, GB WhatsApp provides users with encrypted backups, and users themselves store the keys. From the research conducted at Stanford University, this design has lowered the rate of third-party cracking success from 34% of official backups to 0.7%.
Nonetheless, the security issues of GB WhatsApp should not go unnoticed either. During the first quarter of the year 2025, cybersecurity firm Check Point found 12 high-risk bugs in its codebase (its official had merely 3). Attackers could inject malicious code within 0.8 seconds using the “message preview loading delay” vulnerability, affecting more than 48 million devices. Meanwhile, 23.6% of GB WhatsApp installation packages downloaded from third-party app stores contained spyware, resulting in a 41% year-over-year increase in financial fraud cases among users in countries such as Brazil and Pakistan. Although GB WhatsApp offers the “two-factor authentication” function, the true activation rate is only 19% (the declared rate is 38%), adding to the personal differences in the effectiveness of privacy protection again.