Facebook planted its privacy flag on WhatsApp, the end-to-end encrypted messaging service that Facebook can’t spy on. In a 2018 Senate hearing, Mark Zuckerberg he stated unequivocally that “we don’t see any content on WhatsApp, it’s completely encrypted.” Today, when you open the app, a ToS privacy and update policy says:We cannot read or listen to your personal conversations, as they are encrypted from end to end. [emphasis theirs] That will never change. ”
This is not true, there is a new report from ProPublica on WhatsApp content moderation system. We knew the moderators of WhatsApp exist; that WhatsApp delivers metadata to law enforcement; and that the company has a long time shared user data among its ecosystem of data-thirsty applications. This report it gives a clearer picture of the practices that Facebook has so far deliberately hidden in its attempt to sell users on a privacy-oriented platform. WhatsApp can read some of your messages if the recipient informs them.
This causes a lot of confusion about what the company means when it says “end-to-end encryption,” which by definition means that only recipient and sender possess digital data tabs that allow you to read a message.
ProPublica notes that at least 1,000 moderators hired by Facebook contractor moderator Accenture review user-informed content that has been flagged by their machine learning system. They control, among other things, spam, misinformation, hate speech, potential terrorist threats, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), blackmail, and “sexually oriented businesses”. Based on the content, moderators can ban the account, put the user “under surveillance”, or leave them alone. (This is different from Facebook or Instagram, which also allows moderators to delete individual posts.) In a Wired post earlier this year, WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart he wrote that the company filed “400,000 reports to child safety authorities last year and that people have been prosecuted as a result.”
Most may agree that violent images and CSAM should be monitored and reported; Facebook and Pornhub regularly generate multimedia scandals for not moderating enough. But WhatsApp moderators told ProPublica that the app’s artificial intelligence program sends moderators an excessive number of harmless posts, such as children in bathtubs. Once the marked content reaches them, ProPublica reports that moderators can view the last five messages in a thread.
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WhatsApp reports, in its terms of service, that when an account is reported, it “receives the most recent messages” from the group or user reported, as well as “information about their recent interactions with the informed user.” This does not specify that this information, visible to moderators, may include phone numbers, profile photos, linked Facebook and Instagram accounts, your IP address, and cell phone ID. And, the report notes, WhatsApp does not reveal the fact that it gathers the metadata of all users, regardless of privacy settings.
The collection of messages contradicts the great publicity of WhatsApp earlier this year in a lawsuit against the Indian government. Fighting a new law that would probably have allowed law enforcement officials of India to drag messages from suspects, the company he said in a statement shared with Reuters:
Requiring messaging apps to “track” chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every message sent to WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermine people’s right to privacy. .
But similar to Facebook, WhatsApp seems enthusiastic about sharing metadata with U.S. law enforcement, including data that has helped protect the government from accountability. In a case against a Treasury Department complainant who shared classified documents with BuzzFeed, prosecutors presented the fact that Natalie Edwards had exchanged dozens of messages with a journalist at the time of publication. Edwards now faces a sentence of six months’ imprisonment.
Law enforcement can get a court order ordered to get this information, but WhatsApp can also choose not to store the information:your competitor Signal claims that the only metadata it collects is your contact information. Yes WhatsApp offered Signal’s feature to encrypt metadata as well, the company could not share anything if it had wanted to.
WhatsApp did not offer as much clarity on what mechanism it uses to receive decrypted messages, only that the person who touches the “report” button automatically generates a new message between them and WhatsApp. Tseems to indicate that WhatsApp is being implemented a kind of copy-paste function, but the details are it is not yet clear.
Facebook told Gizmodo that WhatsApp can read messages because it is considered a direct messaging version between the company and the journalist. They added that users who report content make the conscious decision to share information with Facebook; by its logic, the collection of this Facebook material does not conflict with end-to-end encryption.
So yes, WhatsApp can see your messages without your consent.