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WhatsApp assures users that no one can see their messages — but the company has an extensive monitoring operation and regularly shares personal information with prosecutors.
WHEN MARK ZUCKERBERG unveiled a new "privacy-focused vision" for Facebook in March 2019, he cited the company's global messaging service, WhatsApp, as a model.
Zuckerberg's vision centered on WhatsApp's signature feature, which he said the company was planning to apply to Instagram and Facebook Messenger: end-to-end encryption, which converts all messages into an unreadable format that is only unlocked when they reach their intended destinations. WhatsApp messages are so secure, he said, that nobody else — not even the company — can read a word. As Zuckerberg had put it earlier, in testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2018, "We don't see any of the content in WhatsApp."
[...] Those assurances are not true. WhatsApp has more than 1,000 contract workers filling floors of office buildings in Austin, Texas, Dublin and Singapore, where they examine millions of pieces of users' content. Seated at computers in pods organized by work assignments, these hourly workers use special Facebook software to sift through streams of private messages, images and videos that have been reported by WhatsApp users as improper and then screened by the company's artificial intelligence systems. These contractors pass judgment on whatever flashes on their screen — claims of everything from fraud or spam to child porn and potential terrorist plotting — typically in less than a minute.
[...] A ProPublica investigation, drawing on data, documents and dozens of interviews with current and former employees and contractors, reveals how, since purchasing WhatsApp in 2014, Facebook has quietly undermined its sweeping security assurances in multiple ways. (Two articles this summer noted the existence of WhatsApp's moderators but focused on their working conditions and pay rather than their effect on users' privacy. This article is the first to reveal the details and extent of the company's ability to scrutinize messages and user data — and to examine what the company does with that information.)
The reference article gives a detailed account of how privacy is compromised ...
[ProPublica has added this clarification. - Fnord]
Clarification, Sept. 8, 2021: A previous version of this story caused unintended confusion about the extent to which WhatsApp examines its users' messages and whether it breaks the encryption that keeps the exchanges secret. We've altered language in the story to make clear that the company examines only messages from threads that have been reported by users as possibly abusive. It does not break end-to-end encryption.
[Also Covered By]: Gizmodo
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:16PM (18 children)
Schools worked long and hard, training human young to unquestioningly believe any "authority". Now the benefits of universal education are making themselves felt.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @08:10PM (17 children)
Another incorrigable deplorable? Education, especially liberal education, is all about freedom to think for yourself. If all you got out of it was "respect ma authoritay!", you did not understand anything you were taught, so you couldn't think for yourself, and resented your teachers. Reacting against that by claiming education is "brainwashing" is just stupid.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @08:31PM (10 children)
Ah, the person who cannot spell telling others they are uneducated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @09:38PM
Yeah, you tossing looser! Why don't you walk like a tree and leave?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:00PM (8 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:40PM (7 children)
Fun fact: when the letters are on opposite sides of the keyboard, it's not a typo.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:23PM (6 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:38PM (2 children)
Sure, whatever you have to tell yourself, buddy...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:58PM (1 child)
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:24AM
(Keep on pretending to laugh, we know you cry yourself to sleep, hee hee ;))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:46PM (2 children)
typo is from mistaken execution; spelling error is from an intent;
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:55PM (1 child)
A spellchecker is not 'A.I.'.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @08:43AM
using a browser with squiggly line capability just makes it more so a case of intentional misspelling. "I don't give a shit" speaks to not spelling on purpose.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @09:59PM (5 children)
On which planet? When on this planet Earth a student expresses disagreement with teacher, especially about something dictated by politics du jour, what happens to the student then?
From your outburst I see that your "especially liberal education" taught you brazen lying, clumsy bullying, and nothing else. Q.e.d.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @10:07PM (4 children)
Could I talk you into filling me in on what you expect to happen to that student? I didn't go the typical college route.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:05PM (3 children)
Search engine can elucidate the situation quite well, if that is the case. Ask Bing "student expelled/failed for disagreeing" and enjoy the spread.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @11:29PM (2 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:33AM (1 child)
Is lying an obsessive-compulsive disorder peculiar to all lefties, or have you all been taught from same particularly inept trolling manual?
Be that as it may, as to your unrelated question, selling oneself to Google is a voluntary act of a consenting adult, and I personally cannot care less what happens to said adult after as a consequence of that life choice. Satisfied now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @05:54AM
So, the student gets failed for a failure to learn, interprets that as a disagreement, and screams about bloody liberal bias in higher education, when actually they are a failure who cannot comprehend what was going on. Sad, really. Charlie Kirk levels of sad.