WhatsApp and its parent company Meta are facing a new wave of questions about the privacy of messages, after former contractors and employees claimed that content that is supposedly encrypted can be accessed.
According to a Bloomberg report, these accusations have motivated a formal investigation by special agents of the United States Department of Commerce, despite the fact that Meta maintains that access is “impossible.”
According to police records and sources consulted by the aforementioned media, former content moderators who worked for Meta through Accenture stated that they and their colleagues had “unrestricted” access to WhatsApp messages.
“Both sources confirmed that they had employees within their physical workplaces who had unrestricted access to WhatsApp,” wrote the agent summarizing the interviews.
It should be noted that those who testified before an investigator from the Office of Industry and Security of the Department of Commerce performed content moderation tasks for WhatsApp.
These statements contradict the public position of Meta, which has promoted WhatsApp as a private application with end-to-end encryption, ensuring that “no one outside the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to or share” users’ messages.
The report details that the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security was investigating these complaints under “Operation Source Encryption.”One of the moderators claimed to have spoken with an employee of the Facebook team who confirmed access to encrypted messages for cases related to criminal actions.
Meta, through its spokesperson Andy Stone, called the claims impossible: “What these individuals claim is not possible because WhatsApp, its employees and its contractors cannot access people’s encrypted communications.”
The company maintains that end-to-end encryption is an insurmountable technical barrier, an argument it repeats both in the application and advertising and before governments that request access to information for judicial reasons.
Meta’s official spokesperson also described the legal action as “frivolous” and announced that the company “will pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs’ lawyers.”
For its part, the Office of Industry and Security clarified through its spokesperson Lauren Weber Holley that “the BIS is not investigating WhatsApp or Meta for violations of export laws,” although it did not respond to the specific objective of the investigation.
It is not the first time that Meta has faced controversies over user privacy.In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission fined the company a record $5 billion for data protection failures, a settlement that imposed strict oversight over the company’s privacy practices.
Since then, Meta has highlighted end-to-end encryption as a sign of its commitment to protecting information, although these new signs once again call into question user trust.
Despite Meta’s repeated apologies for inappropriate treatment of user data in the past, suspicions and investigations into privacy on WhatsApp persist and continue to fuel public debate about the true security of communications on the platform.
