Every 3 months, Facebook and Instagram publish accurate reports relating to the amount of illegal content identified on the two platforms: as is now known, to deal with moderation of these social networks are over 15 thousand people, whose results are promoted by the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg in an attempt to stem the controversy that periodically hit it.
However, nothing similar happens with regard to WhatsApp, which is always owned by Facebook and refuses to moderate (as explained by Carl Woog, communications director of the messaging service, speaking with ProPublica), because it cannot delete any content and above all in order not to undermine the reputation of a platform that protects privacy, gained over the years.
On the other hand, how could WhatsApp moderate its two billion users if all the contents are protected by end-to-end encryption, which allows only and exclusively the recipient of the messages to decrypt them? Still, WhatsApp employs over a thousand temporary workers in offices in Austin (Texas), Dublin and Singapore. People usually between the ages of twenty and thirty who, sitting in front of their computers, spend the day in check millions and millions of messages, in order to identify those that are violent, abusive or worse; thus leading to the suspension or deletion of the user.
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The work of moderators and artificial intelligences
But how can they see WhatsApp messages if they are encrypted? The reason is simple: they are the millions of messages that people, every single day, report as abusive. By selecting the option Report at the bottom of each contact’s information, “the most recent messages received from this contact”, including videos, photos and more, can be automatically sent to WhatsApp. While these are legitimate actions and are intended to protect users, many may be surprised by the ease with which our messages can be read, above all because the work done by the controllers of WhatsApp is not mentioned anywhere.
Furthermore, this is only a small part of the monitoring operations carried out by the platform, the one that in the investigation conducted by ProPublica is baptized as reactive. Then there is a whole part of work proactive, which is mainly managed by artificial intelligences. Warning: since the messages are encrypted, the algorithms used by WhatsApp obviously cannot read the chats and observe the videos in search of illicit material (as they do on Instagram and Facebook). Instead, what artificial intelligence is about is monitor all unencrypted data that WhatsApp collects on users looking for prohibited behavior (for example, if a person has sent a huge amount of messages it is possible that he is spamming).
What are these metadata? To clarify, an analog example may be useful: metadata is the equivalent of information on the envelope of a letter (the sender, the recipient, the place and day of the shipment, and so on), while the content is what is inside. The limit of this metaphor is that it risks underestimating the amount of information that can be collected thanks to the large number of unencrypted metadata that we transmit to WhatsApp.
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How many secrets inside the metadata
Our name, profile picture, what we wrote about the status, names and pictures of our groups, the IP address and the identification of the smartphone, the operating system, each connected Facebook or Instagram account, the language used and the time zone. Again: with whom we communicated, for how long, sending how many messages and so on. By crossing them, it is possible to obtain such valuable information that, according to a former NSA consultant, “if you have enough metadata, you don’t even need the content”. And in fact it was the NSA that gathered this kind of elements in the infamous mass surveillance program unveiled by Edward Snowden.
It is the reason why the platforms favored by those who care most about privacy (such as politicians, activists, dissidents, investigative journalists and the like) collect as little metadata as possible, so that they cannot provide it even if they wanted to. AND the case of Signal, which in 2016 came sued by the FBI to oblige you to provide the data of a person. Because it only had the user’s registration date and last use of the app, the messaging platform founded by Moxie Marlinspike was unable to disclose any other information.
And WhatsApp? “Even within an encrypted system, we are still capable of respond to legal requests regarding metadata, including the most important ones such as location or account information – Facebook specified in January 2020, during a hearing at the US Senate Commission – Unlike other encrypted services, WhatsApp provides a simple system that helps people to report abuse or security concerns ”.
There are no specific numbers on the amount of law enforcement requests that have been met by WhatsApp. According to ProPublica, i 12 known cases from 2017 to date are only a part of the total. Overall, government requests to get access to messages sent through Facebook’s various platforms increased by 276% between 2017 and 2020. Over the same time frame, the rate of positive responses from Zuckerberg’s company has increased since ’84 at 95%.
For instance, the data released by WhatsApp was recently used to convict Natalie Edwards, a former Treasury Ministry official who disclosed secret documents in 2018, revealing suspicious banking transactions. The metadata relating to communications via WhatsApp with a BuzzFeed News reporter was sufficient to demonstrate that she was the source of the secret information leak, despite the messages being protected by end-to-end encryption. Nothing that WhatsApp does with the information it obtains about us is illegal or undermines the protection guaranteed by the encryption of messages, the important thing is know clearly how this platform works, what information it collects and what can be, in the most serious cases, the stakes.
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