Local Storage | Developer Documentation

Local storage offers an additional layer of data management control, by giving you the option to specify where your message data is stored at rest. If your company is in a regulated industry such as finance, government, or healthcare, you may prefer to have your message data stored in a specific country when at rest because of regulatory or company policies.

Local storage is controlled by a setting enabled or disabled at a WhatsApp business phone number level. Both Cloud API and Marketing Messages API for WhatsApp support local storage, and the setting will apply to any messages sent via either API if enabled.

When Local storage is enabled, the following constraints are applied to message content for a business phone number:

The local storage feature supplements other WhatsApp Business Platform privacy and security controls?, and allows customers to ensure a higher level of compliance with local data protection regulations.

Local storage applies to message content (text and media) sent and/or received via Cloud API and Marketing Messages API for WhatsApp. The following message content are in scope of the local storage feature:

In addition, a limited set of metadata attributes is included with the locally stored message content, in order to correctly associate the encrypted message payload with the originally processed message, and to audit the fact of localization. The stored metadata is protected with tokenization and encryption.

If your business has enabled the contact book feature and a WhatsApp user shares their contact information by tapping the share contact information button, Meta extracts the user's phone number from the shared contact card (vCard) and stores it in your contact book. The contact book is hosted on Meta data centers, regardless of your Local Storage configuration. Only the phone number is extracted and stored; no other vCard data is retained on Meta data centers beyond the standard data-in-use period. Contact book retention policies apply to this data and you can turn off this feature.

To see what regions are supported by local storage, see the data_localization_region parameter in the documentation on phone number registration.

For example:

Note that this deregisters the business phone number so it cannot be used with WhatsApp Cloud API. If you want to continue using it with Cloud API but without local storage enabled, you must reregister it without including the data_localization_region parameter.

We support all migration paths to Cloud API version with Local Storage, this includes:

In all these scenarios you would need to send a POST request to the /register endpoint for the selected phone number, specifying the target country for which data to be localized in a new parameter data_localization_region.

No migration risks. Downtime is typically less than 5 minutes and no re-verification of the business phone number is required.

If a business phone number is already registered, you will need to de-register and re-register the phone number with local storage enabled. This process typically takes less than 5 minutes. No re-verification of the business phone number is required during this process.