WhatsApp Moderators Can Read Your Messages
AnonTechie writes:
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
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