The non-profit organization ProPublica conducted a large-scale investigation, during which the features of the world’s most popular messenger were revealed. As it turned out, some messages from WhatsApp are transmitted in unencrypted form for moderation to a third-party company.
Facebook Now Reads Users WhatsApp Private Messages
On WhatsApp, each user can report a message if he thinks it contains inappropriate content or violates the rules of the service in any way. It turned out that at first such messages and those preceding them are given to artificial intelligence, which confirms or refutes the fact of violation. Potentially harmful messages are then passed on to moderators from Accenture.
It is reported that at least a thousand moderators based in at least three offices around the world are engaged in checking messages from WhatsApp in Accenture: American Austin, Irish Dublin and Singapore. At the same time, WhatsApp removes end-to-end encryption from transmitted messages and does not remove metadata, including information about the number of messages and the time they were sent, as well as the time and duration of calls.
The report says it takes less than a minute for a moderator to determine if a message contains signs of fraud, spam, child pornography, or a terrorist conspiracy. In addition, per shift, each moderator must check at least 600 messages for which complaints have been received, for which they receive $ 16.5 per hour.
It is indicated that when sending a complaint, the user agrees to the transfer of data, but at the same time, the developers of WhatsApp and even the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, have repeatedly stated that they do not have access to messages from the messenger.