The scandals surrounding WhatsApp are not going to end - the journalists of ProPublica have obtained internal documents that confirm that WhatsApp reads the correspondence of its users. Despite Zuckerberg's claims about the complete privacy of chats, there is a way to quickly decrypt them, which is used in case of complaints about messages.
As soon as the moderator receives a complaint, he can forcibly disable end-to-end encryption of chats using special software and see what a specific user writes. The whole process takes less than a minute, and first the correspondence is analyzed by artificial intelligence and only after that real people get down to business.
The corporation carefully conceals the fact of viewing chats. To do this, Facebook created a subsidiary company Accenture, which has offices in Ireland, Singapore and the United States. The check is carried out by the so-called "content browsers", there are more than a thousand of them. These are people between the ages of 20 and 30 who earn $ 16.5 an hour. To maintain secrecy, each of the employees signs a nondisclosure agreement, and they are obliged to answer Accenture questions about the place of work, without telling about their connections with WhatsApp and Facebook.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg regularly cites end-to-end encryption as the main strength of WhatsApp adds a special charm to the situation. And it implies that the keys to chats are stored only by the sender and the recipient, so any third parties, including company employees, cannot access messages.
Officials of the corporation have not yet commented on the situation, but the former director of security for WhatsApp Alex Staymos spoke out. He claims the ProPublica investigation is inherently wrong. Because when the user clicks the "report spam" button, he kind of forwards the message to the WhatsApp moderators, and they can watch it without having to decrypt the entire conversation. According to Steimos, the messenger does try to restrict the sending of illegal and shocking content, but without breaking its promises about the confidentiality of chats. Who is right in this situation is not yet fully clear.
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