Did Google have access to WhatsApp messages?

18 December 20203 years ago babelfish

Texas attorney claims Google has struck a deal with Facebook to access millions of private messages and photos of WhatsApp users

Google has accessed Whatsapp private messages. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is convinced of this and has opened a far-reaching antitrust investigation , which among other things talks about an agreement between the Mountain View giant and that of Menlo Park.

Let's go step by step.

DID GOOGLE HAVE ACCESS TO FACEBOOK MESSAGES?

Let's start with the complaint . According to the Texas prosecutor's indictment, Google has struck an agreement with Facebook to access millions of private messages and photos of WhatsApp users, immediately after the acquisition of the app.

THE DARK PASSAGES

The accusation, serious, reaches page 57 of the investigation document, but the passages relating to the exclusive agreement, as The Verge writes, have been obscured.

POSSIBLE ACCESS?

But could Google really have access to private messages? WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, meaning Facebook itself did not have centralized access to users' messages at the time of acquisition. An agreement of this type, therefore, is unthinkable.

ACCESS TO BACKUP FILES?

Or maybe yes. The Texas attorney's allegations, which come after months of investigation, according to Alex Stamos, of the Stanford Internet Observatory, may refer to backup files, which are user-initiated and are located outside of the end-to-end encryption of the service. But even then, the Texas thesis doesn't hold up well. Stamos points out that Google makes storage of WhatsApp backups on Google Drive available for Android users, but there is nothing exclusive about the agreement and it is not clear why it would have required a written agreement.

Facebook does not have that data. The only explanation could be the optional WhatsApp backup, which goes into GDrive on Android (iCloud on iOS). But I can't imagine Google mining GDrive backups for advertising. That's insane.

– Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) December 16, 2020

GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK REJECT THE ACCUSATIONS

The accusations are rejected by the two giants. And in doing so, the Mountain View one underlined the company's privacy policy: "We do not sell your information to anyone and we do not use the information in apps where you mainly store personal content, such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos, for advertising purposes, period, ”Sundar Pichai wrote in a statement in June.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/google-ha-avuto-accesso-ai-messaggi-di-whatsapp/ on Fri, 18 Dec 2020 08:41:13 +0000.