IPLS: Privacy-preserving storage for your WhatsApp contacts

Your contact list is fundamental to the experiences you love and enjoy on WhatsApp. With contacts, you know which of your friends and family are on WhatsApp, you can easily message or call them, and it helps give you context on who is in your groups. But losing your phone could mean losing your contact list as well. Traditionally, WhatsApp has lacked the ability to store your contact list in a way that can be easily and automatically restored in the event you lose it. What’s more, the only place you were able to add contacts was from your mobile device, by either typing in a phone number or scanning a QR code.

As part of WhatsApp’s new feature to privately add and manage your contacts on WhatsApp across linked devices, we’re announcing a novel encrypted storage system we’ve designed called Identity Proof Linked Storage (IPLS). IPLS allows you to save your contacts and automatically restore them directly through WhatsApp. With IPLS in place, you can now create contacts directly within WhatsApp and choose to sync them to your phone or securely save them only to WhatsApp – giving you the ability to create contacts that are specific to your account. If you use linked devices, this also allows you to add and manage contacts seamlessly regardless of which device you’re on.

Additionally, if you have multiple accounts on the same phone, such as a work and personal account, you can now customize your contact list for each account. If you lose your phone, your contact list can be restored on a newly registered device. 

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