A security company Symantec, in a 2023 report, states WhatsApp GB has extended the limit of file size of videos from WhatsApp’s official limit of 16MB to 1.5GB by altering the media transfer protocol of APK. But it only manages to transfer 68% of the time, and average time taken has been made 3.7 times that of the official version’s. For example, in 2022, when a specific film and television team in Indonesia transmitted 800MB of sample 4K movies via WhatsApp GB, due to a protocol vulnerability, the packet loss rate of the data was as high as 29%, and eventually, they had to pay additional 45 US dollars to complete the transmission using a professional FTP tool. From the technical implementation perspective, the function is implemented based on block transmission technology (256KB per block), but the error rate of unofficial encryption module’s CRC check has increased from 0.001% to 1.2%, which caused a 17% failure rate of matching video file hash value (SHA-256).
The large file transmit feature of WhatsApp GB has a very much larger device resource burden – during transmitting 1GB videos on Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the highest CPU usage rate reaches 89% (32% for the normal app), memory leak is prolonged by 78MB per hour. And body temperature rose to 47℃ (ambient temperature 25℃). An experiment conducted by Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 proved that repeatedly sending three files of 500MB each would increase the likelihood of WhatsApp GB process crashes to 41%, and the average time expense of manually restarting the application was 6 minutes per instance. More seriously, this position circumvents Google SafetyNet’s DRM detection, making it more likely that video copyright metadata (e.g., XMP tags) will be tampered with from 0.7% to 23%, and users will be exposed to legal litigations (e.g., in the 287 copyright infringement lawsuits Disney filed against Brazilian pirated distributors in 2023, 63% involve the WhatsApp GB transmission chain).
In compliance, WhatsApp GB’s mass file storing system violates Article 32 of the GDPR. Its temporary cache files do not employ the AES-256-GCM encryption algorithm, and risk leakage is six times higher than that of the licensed cloud storage. In a 2023 South African medical data breach, a 230MB patient MRI video that was being sent by a hospital over WhatsApp GB was targeted by a man-in-the-middle. Hackers bulk-uploaded it on the dark web for sale at 0.03 Bitcoin (approximately 600 US dollars), and it resulted in the hospital being fined 380,000 rand (approximately 21,000 US dollars). Research also suggests that enabling this feature results in excessive metadata collection – for every 1GB of video sent, WhatsApp GB synchronously collects data of 12 types of devices (like gyroscope sampling rate and battery cycle times), and the data return frequency is up to 5 times a second.
Data of user behavior indicates that 34% of users of WhatsApp GB turn on the transmission integrity verification (e.g., MD5 verification), and professional users are able to cut the transmission error rate from 19% down to 0.07% using third-party software (e.g., Send Anywhere). In 2022, the Philippines telecommunications regulatory agency reported that 15% of more than 500MB videos delivered via WhatsApp GB contained malicious pop-up ads (1.8 per second) for which consumers were charged an average of $0.25 each as a sneaky fee accidentally brushed against. Security specialists advise that when big files need to be transmitted, the traffic transmission must be restricted within the WireGuard protocol tunnel by a VPN (with an encryption overhead of just 1.3%), and the files need to be divided into 128MB blocks in order to transmit them several times, which can reduce the likelihood of losing data by up to 72%.
While WhatsApp GB prides itself on supporting “lossless transmission”, the drift of its compression algorithm during video transcoding has caused picture quality degradation – the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-noise ratio) of H.264 encoding fell from 48dB in the original version to 39dB, and the chroma sampling rate dropped from 4:2:0 to 4:1:1. In its 2023 Netflix Content Review Report, it reports that among the film and television content streamed via WhatsApp GB, 63% failed quality control due to the bitrate being lowered from 50Mbps to 8Mbps, and the average cost of reproduction was up to $1,200 per minute. Enterprise customers should make embracing enterprise-class solutions (such as Signiant Media Shuttle) their top priority, whose UDP acceleration protocol can cut 1GB files’ download from 47 minutes of WhatsApp GB to only 1.2 minutes. And on blockchain proof-of-evidence storage tech, the accuracy level of tracing copyrights has been increased to 99.99%.