Facebook Could Be Reading Your WhatsApp Messages

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. 

1. 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. 

2. Big Tech is rarely transparent about just how much surveillance power it has. This is yet another of those cases.

Those anti-consumer standards are the market trends you can use the power of Reklaim to challenge.

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.

Meanwhile, Facebook advertisers are reportedly struggling to track sales in the wake of Apple’s spring anti-tracking changes. Seems like people, when asked explicitly whether they want to be tracked across apps, tend to say no. 

The recent privacy changes suggest that Apple and Facebook are getting on board with the direction consumer data is headed in: more access and control for consumers. 

But Apple, Facebook, and others are not talking about providing data profit sharing or holistic access to consumer data profiles. Last week, we rebranded as Reklaim because our mission is to provide that access.

With Reklaim your data is yours. Take back control.

what we’re reading

• The state of consumer data privacy laws in the US

• What China’s new data privacy law means for US companies

• WhatsApp fined $267 million for breaking Europe privacy laws

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