Whatsapp advertises secure end-to-end encryption.
As a US magazine claims to have found out, employees still access chats.
Kassel - So far, Whatsapp *, a company belonging to Facebook, had always claimed that no one could read their own chats.
As the US magazine Propublica has now established, this is not entirely the truth.
First of all, it should be said that the messages sent are encrypted in the popular messenger app.
As a result, the conversations should not be able to be searched by WhatsApp, the parent company Facebook or the police.
The assertion that because of the encryption nobody can read the course is not correct, claimed Peter Elkind, a reporter from Propublica.
Criticism of Whatsapp: Messenger is said to collect an unusually large amount of data
“Whatsapp does reveal that the last couple of messages have been released for review.
But it doesn't say exactly how many there are.
According to our research, there are five.
What they don't say either: an army of maybe 1,000 external content moderators look at the reported chats after an AI system has checked them in advance, ”the report says.
These moderators are not employed by Whatsapp, but work for third-party companies. The people are distributed in Dublin, Singapore and Austin, Texas, Ireland. The author of the US magazine explained that, for example, user histories are released to the group for reading as soon as certain messages are reported, for example due to offensive content.
Elkind criticized the fact that the Facebook subsidiary entrusts employees with highly sensitive data to external companies.
Propublica also accuses the messenger service of collecting an unusually large amount of metadata from its users.
These are collections of data that are correspondingly large depending on the access requirements of the respective app.
In the meantime, many people have even migrated to alternatives due to the new WhatsApp terms and conditions.
Examination by external employees: Expert takes Whatsapp under protection
In the case of Whatsapp, this should be the identity of the user, telephone number, profile photo, status message, battery level of the phone, language and time zone as well as associated Facebook accounts.
In a statement to the ARD, Facebook said that the reporting function prevents serious abuse.
Like other messenger apps, Whatsapp is dependent on reported violations of terms of use or laws.
As heise.de reports, an automatic search of the chats with the help of artificial intelligence is not possible - as with Facebook and Instagram.
You can find more news about the popular Messenger app on our Whatsapp theme page *.
But despite all the criticism on the part of Propublica, experts also protect Whatsapp's approach. Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained on Twitter that reporting inappropriate content and a subsequent check would not undermine the messenger's end-to-end encryption. Nevertheless, there are "a lot of problems" with Whatsapp. (Nail Akkoyun)
* hna.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
