Facebook can reportedly read your WhatsApp messages

After WhatsApp shared its updated terms and privacy policy earlier this year, several rumors started circulating online, claiming that the company could read your private messages and share their contents with Facebook. WhatsApp vehemently denied these rumors and claimed that neither it nor Facebook could read your messages or hear your calls on the platform thanks to end-to-end encryption. It even took the opportunity to take a dig at Telegram, as it doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption. However, a new report claims that both WhatsApp and Facebook can somehow view the contents of your private messages.

The damning report comes from ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization with a solid track record. It claims (via 9to5Google) that both Facebook and WhatsApp can view the contents of your private WhatsApp messages. The report notes:

[An] assurance automatically appears on-screen before users send messages: “No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them.”

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 […]

Many of the assertions by content moderators working for WhatsApp are echoed by a confidential whistleblower complaint filed last year with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The complaint, which ProPublica obtained, details WhatsApp’s extensive use of outside contractors, artificial intelligence systems and account information to examine user messages, images and videos. It alleges that the company’s claims of protecting users’ privacy are false. “We haven’t seen this complaint,” the company spokesperson said. The SEC has taken no public action on it; an agency spokesperson declined to comment.

Since WhatsApp maintains that it uses end-to-end encryption, the aforementioned moderators shouldn’t be able to see the contents of your messages. That’s because end-to-end encryption should mean that only the sender and the recipient have the ability to decrypt messages. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The report further notes:

Because WhatsApp’s content is encrypted, artificial intelligence systems can’t automatically scan all chats, images and videos, as they do on Facebook and Instagram. Instead, WhatsApp reviewers gain access to private content when users hit the “report” button on the app, identifying a message as allegedly violating the platform’s terms of service. This forwards five messages — the allegedly offending one along with the four previous ones in the exchange, including any images or videos — to WhatsApp in unscrambled form, according to former WhatsApp engineers and moderators. Automated systems then feed these tickets into “reactive” queues for contract workers to assess.

In response to the report, a WhatsApp spokesperson said: “We build WhatsApp in a manner that limits the data we collect while providing us tools to prevent spam, investigate threats, and ban those engaged in abuse, including based on user reports we receive. This work takes extraordinary effort from security experts and a valued trust and safety team that works tirelessly to help provide the world with private communication.” While the spokesperson didn’t directly address the alleged lack of end-to-end encryption, they added that “Based on the feedback we’ve received from users, we’re confident people understand when they make reports to WhatsApp we receive the content they send us.”

If the details mentioned in the ProPublica report are accurate, both Facebook and WhatsApp could get in some serious trouble. 9to5Google speculates that there might have been some misunderstanding during the investigation, and the moderators could be reviewing Facebook messages and not WhatsApp messages. But we can’t be sure of that at the moment.

Currently, we don’t have any further information about this concerning development. But we’ll make sure to let you know as soon as we learn more.

The post Facebook can reportedly read your WhatsApp messages appeared first on xda-developers.

from xda-developers https://ift.tt/3kZUTPY
via IFTTT