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| Facebook Acess To Whatsapp Msgs |
Facebook-owned WhatsApp, used by billions of people around the world, is not as private as the company expresses, writes Business Insider.
The messaging service praises privacy, and Facebook says the company cannot read messages sent between users. But still, the SoMe giant reportedly pays a team of employees around the world to read WhatsApp messages through and moderate the content in them - read and moderate users' private messages, mind you.
As a new ProPublica survey highlights, Facebook employs more than 1,000 contract employees in, respectively. Austin, Texas, Dublin, and Singapore, where they sit and examine users' content.
These employees reportedly spend their working days sorting into content reported by WhatsApp users or the service's own algorithms.
A Facebook representative tells Insider that users have the ability to report abuse and that contract staff subsequently reviewed these reports. When a user marks something as abuse, it forwards the content of the reported user to the WhatsApp moderators, according to the service's FAQ.
WhatsApp is based on so-called "end-to-end" encryption, which means that messages are encrypted before they are sent and decrypted only when they are received by the intended user. However, when a user reports abuse, unencrypted versions of the reported content are sent to the service's moderators, writes ProPublica, which in that case does not match the service's branding.
“Every day, WhatsApp protects over 100 billion end-to-end encryption messages to help people communicate securely. We have built our service in a way that limits the data we collect, while trying to prevent spam, investigate threats and ban those involved in the worst form of abuse, "said a WhatsApp spokesman. from Facebook to Insider. "We value our trust and security team, who work tirelessly to enable over two billion users to communicate privately
