Despite Facebook’s aggressive branding on the privacy of WhatsApp, the messaging service it owns, hundreds of contractors read messages flagged as potentially abusive on the platform, according to a ProPublica investigation.
To be sure, Facebook is not sifting through all your WhatsApp messages. Your information likely remains obscure to Facebook and its contractors.
But the question is whether the access to allegedly abusive messages will be misused and whether Facebook, which touts end-to-end encryption on its messaging service, has been transparent with users about its ability to review what they send.
We’d emphasize two takeaways here.
- Facebook, like all of Big Tech, reserves the right to surveil you, and you’re not going to get a say in whether it happens.
- Big Tech is rarely transparent about just how much surveillance power it has. This is yet another of those cases.
Apple Applies Its Own Rules to … Apple
Apple has been the focus of consumer data privacy talk for the past year because the company rolled out a rule in the spring forcing apps to ask users before tracking them on iOS devices. But it appears Apple wasn’t applying the same rule to itself.
Apple recently announced that, with its upcoming iOS 15 update, it will begin asking iOS device users whether they want to be tracked or receive personalized ads in Apple-owned apps such as the App Store.
Of course, that highlights that Apple wasn’t applying the same privacy standards it was forcing on third-party apps to its own apps. Not a great look for a company that wants to be known as the gold standard of consumer privacy.
Apple could be making the move to ward off antitrust regulators here in the US or privacy regulators abroad, for example in France, where the company has taken heat for this precise double standard.