Facebook Undermines Privacy Protections for Its 2B WhatsApp Users

https://thewire.in/tech/facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-whatsapp-users

by webmobdev • 5 years ago

41 22 5 years ago

glugc• 5 years ago

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.

lpcvoid• 5 years ago

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

duud• 5 years ago

The fact this site has a fixed AdSense ad at the bottom of the page suggests they don't care that much about privacy.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

"A 49-slide internal company marketing presentation from December, obtained by ProPublica, emphasises the “fierce” promotion of WhatsApp’s “privacy narrative.” It compares its “brand character” to “the Immigrant Mother” and displays a photo of Malala Yousafzai, who survived a shooting by the Taliban and became a Nobel Peace Prize winner, in a slide titled “Brand tone parameters.”

what on earth? Legitimately how do you design this and don't think you're in some sort of American Psycho skit.

stavros• 5 years ago

Since the announcement a few months ago, almost all of my friends and groups migrated to Signal. Good riddance to WhatsApp. I even find Signal a better messaging client than WhatsApp.

uniqueuid• 5 years ago

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.

seanieb5• 5 years ago

This story is FUD, pointing out that WhatsApp users can forward messages they received to WhatsApp’s abuse team, when reporting abuse…

I’m not a fan of FB, but the series of stories on this reporting tool which has been in the product for years is so bad, from journalists and publications that should know better, that I’m almost certain there’s some level of malice to it. Apple muddying the water with its billion dollar PR tentacles?

schleck82• 5 years ago

i wonder what the solution here looks like — not being allowed to report spam etc? Them completely ignoring moderation and going down the instagram path, direct message style?

square_usual4• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway525142• 5 years ago

So the WhatsApp AI can arbitrarily decide to unencrypt your chats and send them for review.

Where do you read the "decide to unencrypt your chats" part? I could only find that they have to decide based on the unencrypted parts of a WhatsApp profile plus other unencrypted data.

square_usual4• 5 years ago

The article clearly mentions that the AI initiates the proactive queue:

    Artificial intelligence initiates a second set of queues [...] by scanning unencrypted data.

Initiates pretty clearly signals that no user reported the users in this queue. Also, the article mentions before this that the workers have to look at two queues of tickets which have unencrypted content for the moderators to judge. I agree that this is somewhat unclear, but I think it's certainly talking about two different things.

E: the ProPublica article clarified that this is incorrect: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...

seanieb5• 5 years ago

No they can’t arbitrarily decrypt messages. This process happens AFTER a user has complained and forwarded the unencrypted messages to WhatsApps abuse team.

You’re first instinct is correct this is a BS nothing burger by journalist that should know better. It’s a stain on Propublica’s reputation.

square_usual4• 5 years ago

It's disappointing to see so many people here read maybe the first 10% of the article and decide it's nothing, when there's so much damning about WhatsApp's business model in here. WhatsApp revealed complete metdata that led to a whistleblower getting indicted, they harvest reams of personal data about you, and their AI can decide to unencrypt your information if it feels like it. Even the bit about moderating user-reported content isn't entirely "nothing" either, because WhatsApp's messaging clearly says nobody, including WhatsApp, can read your messages, which is incorrect. This is bad and not holding WhatsApp to account for this, when this very community spent weeks raging at Apple, as weird.

seanieb5• 5 years ago

They can’t decrypt your messages. You would first need to send them your unencrypted messages before they can read them… please correct your comment. There’s enough misinformation in the world.

ssss11• 5 years ago

“Battery level”

Ah yes, the ol’ suspicious battery level

lvs• 5 years ago

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

bsaul• 5 years ago

i'm still unable to tell if what they've implemented is some kind of automated copy/pasting from the recipient side (which can always be done by screenshotting the phone and sending it via email), or a server-side backdoor that lets one get cleartext copies of the messages.

schleck82• 5 years ago

pretty sure its neither but manual reports by a user and probably account rating based on how many chats a user has and their phonenumber to prevent large campaigns

seanieb5• 5 years ago

Great journalism eh?!

top_sigrid• 5 years ago

This shows that all e2e encryption efforts are totally worthless with regards to the company owning the service/app. Of course e2e encryption is very important and a good thing, but I never trusted all the "not even we can see your content unencrypted on our server" talk, as they could access anything in the app anyways if they wanted.

I brought this argument up many times in discussions but it was often deemed as being a conspiracy theory, but now here we have it.

Facebook Undermines Privacy Protections for Its 2B WhatsApp Users

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