According to reports, Facebook’s messaging app WhatsApp often boasts of using “end-to-end” encryption technology to ensure user communication privacy, but the latest report shows that Facebook does monitor WhatsApp messages, and the company’s CEO Mark Zha Mark Zuckerberg did not tell the truth to the U.S. Senate.
In 2016, WhatsApp announced that it would use “end-to-end” encryption for all communications on its platform, covering everything from message to file transfer. This means that the information transmitted by WhatsApp can only be opened by the sender and receiver, and Facebook itself cannot be opened.
The purpose of using “end-to-end” encryption is to provide users with a certain degree of privacy and security, but this does not seem to be the case for WhatsApp. According to the latest report, WhatsApp employs more than 1,000 contract workers in Austin, Dublin and Singapore to review “millions of user content.”
These employees “use special Facebook software” to view messages and content marked by WhatsApp users and filtered by the artificial intelligence system. But in 2018, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg said in testimony to the U.S. Senate: “We didn’t check anything in WhatsApp.”
The report also stated that, in fact, a complaint filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2020 also pointed out this problem (Facebook censored WhatsApp content). The lawsuit alleges that WhatsApp uses external contractors, artificial intelligence and account information to monitor user messages, images and videos and that WhatsApp’s claims about protecting user privacy are false.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said: “We have not seen this complaint.” So far, the SEC has not taken public action on this complaint. WhatsApp also said that the way the app is built restricts data collection and provides various tools to prevent spam, investigate threats, and prohibit some abuses. In addition, WhatsApp also emphasized the work of trust and security teams, security experts, and introduced new privacy features.
In fact, this is not the first time WhatsApp has faced similar accusations. As early as 2017, someone claimed to have discovered a “backdoor” that allowed Facebook to view the content of encrypted messages. At the time, WhatsApp denied that there was a “backdoor” in use.
Earlier this year, the change in privacy policy caused another headache for WhatsApp. WhatsApp updated the business chat log to store them on Facebook servers. Users are cautious about this change, insisting that this is Facebook’s grabbing of personal data.
