The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released its annual report, where Apple, Automattic and Dropbox earned a 5-star rating for their defense of user data. The data protection report assesses companies on 5 criteria – from their support for pro-privacy public policy to their disclosure of government data requests. EFF also gave high marks to Yahoo! and Wikimedia.

On the contrary, WhatsApp (rated separately from its parent company Facebook) and AT&T got just one star each. Both companies lost marks for failure to tell users about government requests and about their policies on data retention.

This is the fifth time the EFF released the report, and this time it has tightened up the criteria required to get a 5-star rating. The group explained that the criteria used to rate companies 5 years ago were ambitious for the time, but now they’ve been almost universally adopted.

The report awards a star for each of 5 criteria the companies satisfy:
1. For following best practices on government data requests. This includes three things: requiring a warrant before the company hands over data; releasing regular transparency reports; and explaining how the company responds to such requests.

2. For informing users about government requests – in all cases where it makes sense, except for situations where it is prohibited by law. In addition, the companies must notify users in advance to allow them to defend themselves against government demands for data.

3. For publicly disclosing the company’s data retention policies. This requires to tell users how long such data as logged IP addresses and deleted content is stored on the companies servers and can be accessed by law enforcement.

4. For disclosing the number of times the government requires to remove user content or accounts, along with the proportion of cases where the company complies.

5. For taking a specific pro-user public policy position. For example, in 2015 this entails opposing the compelled inclusion of deliberate security weaknesses or other compelled backdoors.

So, WhatsApp rated the last with the only star for the public position taken by its parent company against backdoors. As for the rest, the EFF concludes that WhatsApp should meet all other criteria to improve its rating.