Facebook Undermines Privacy Protections for Its 2B WhatsApp Users

The anti Facebook slant of the mass media is appalling. A gazillion words to explain that content reported by users is then judged by the company as abusive or not.

The "anti Facebook slant" is rooted in a history of complete disregard for user data and privacy, so I find it warranted.

I am highly sceptical of Facebook's ethical stance on many issues.

But we have to admit that some of the decisions here are not trivial. The report is not about randomly monitoring messages, it's about messages that were reported by users.

The executive actually puts the dilemma pretty well:

> “WhatsApp is a lifeline for millions of people around the world,” the company said. “The decisions we make around how we build our app are focused around the privacy of our users, maintaining a high degree of reliability and preventing abuse.”

These platforms are helping a lot of people, and they can't fix all man-made problems (i.e. crime, hate speech etc.).

There is a lot of valid criticism against the way they are facilitating hidden discrimination, helping obscure political targeted influence and so on - but this issue is IMO not as contentious.

At first I thought the bit about seeing user-reported content was a nothingburger, but this is far, far worse:

    Artificial intelligence initiates a second set of queues – so-called proactive ones – by scanning unencrypted data that WhatsApp collects about its users and comparing it against suspicious account information and messaging patterns [...] as well as terms and images that have previously been deemed abusive. The unencrypted data available for scrutiny is extensive. It includes the names and profile images of a user’s WhatsApp groups as well as their phone number, profile photo, status message, phone battery level, language and time zone, unique mobile phone ID and IP address, wireless signal strength and phone operating system, as a list of their electronic devices, any related Facebook and Instagram accounts, the last time they used the app and any previous history of violations.

So the WhatsApp AI can arbitrarily decide to unencrypt your chats and send them for review. This makes the recent event where their CEO attacked Apple's CSAM detection algorithm almost funny in hindsight: takes one to know one, eh?

E: Upon looking into this further, the source from ProPublica makes it clear that the proactive queue cannot decrypt your messages. This was unclear in the linked article and only clarified separately in the ProPublica one. Despite that, I think the point still stands: WhatsApp gathers a ton of your personal data, and can reveal that to authorities on request.

Link should be replaced: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...