SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Rights Advocates Demand Probe Into Reports That Israel Uses WhatsApp to Target Palestinians
"The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communications via WhatsApp or the groups they join," said a Palestinian digital rights group.
May 18, 2024
The Palestinian digital rights group Sada Social on Saturday called for an investigation into Israel's alleged use of WhatsApp user data to target Palestinians with its AI system, Lavender.
The group, which is affiliated with the Al Jazeera Media Institute and Access Now, accused Meta, which owns WhatsApp, of fueling "the 'Lavender' artificial intelligence system used by the Israeli military to kill Palestinian individuals within the Gaza enclave."
As Common Dreamsreported in April, the Israel Defense Forces has relied on AI systems including Lavender to target people Israel believes to be Hamas members.
At +972 Magazine, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham wrote that a current commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit pushed for the use of AI to choose targets in Gaza. The commander wrote in a guide book to create the system that "hundreds and thousands" of features can be used to select targets, "such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently."
Sada Social asserted that it had found the Lavender system uses WhatsApp data to select targets.
"The reports monitored by the Sada Social Center indicate that one of the inputs to the 'Lavender' system relies on data collected from WhatsApp groups containing names of Palestinians or activists who are wanted by 'Israel,'" said the group in a press release. "The Israeli Lavender system, supported by artificial intelligence, identifies Palestinians by tracking their communications via WhatsApp or the groups they join."
The mention of Israel's use of WhatsApp data in Abraham's reporting also caught the attention last month of Paul Biggar, founder of Tech for Palestine.
"There's a lot wrong with this—I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbors, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect," wrote Biggar. "But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a 'private' social network, including 'end-to-end' encryption of messages."
"Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app," he wrote. "It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of 'pre-crime' targets and their families, in violation of international humanitarian law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in 'pre-crime.'"
Others have pointed out that Israel may have acquired WhatsApp data through means other than a leak by Meta.
Journalist Marc Owen Jones said the question of "Meta's potential role in this is important," but noted that informants, captured devices, and spyware could be used by Israel to gain Palestinian users' WhatsApp data.
Bahraini activist Esra'a Al Shafei, founder of Majal.org, told the Middle East Monitor that the reports that WhatsApp user data has been used by the IDF's AI machine demonstrate why privacy advocates warn against the collection and storage of metadata, "particularly for apps like WhatsApp, which falsely advertise their product as fully private."
"Even though WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and claims to not have any backdoors to any government, the metadata alone is sufficient to expose detailed information about users, especially if the user's phone number is attached to other Meta products and related activities," Al Shafei said. "This is why the IDF could plausibly utilize metadata to track and locate WhatsApp users."
While Meta and WhatsApp may not necessarily be collaborating with Israel, she said, "by the very act of collecting this information, they're making themselves vulnerable to abuse and intrusive external surveillance."
In turn, "by using WhatsApp, people are risking their lives," she added.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told Anadolu last month that "WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government," adding that "Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested."
Al Shafei said Meta must "fully investigate" how WhatsApp's metadata may be used "to track, harm, or kill its users throughout Palestine."
"WhatsApp is used by billions of people and these users have a right to know what the dangers are in using the app," she said, "or what WhatsApp and Meta will do to proactively protect them from such misuse."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Signal Trolls Facebook by Showing How Data Is Collected for Targeted Advertising
"You got this ad because you're a newlywed pilates instructor and you're cartoon crazy."
May 04, 2021
After a coalition of digital rights and other groups launched a campaign on Monday aimed at thwarting Facebook's planned privacy rollback on its popular WhatsApp messaging application, competitor Signal--which does not collect user data--on Tuesday began trolling the social media giant and its ubiquitous data collection in a tongue-in-cheek ad illustrating the intrusiveness of the practice.
"The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible."
--Jun Harada, Signal
Amid a viral messaging campaign that has included the revelation that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "leads by example" by using the encrypted app, Signal created a multi-variant targeted ad that Jun Harada, the company's head of growth and communication, said is "designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to."
Alas, Facebook--which Signal says blocked the ad--"was not that into the idea," Harada wrote in a blog post, adding that the social media titan "is more than willing to sell visibility into people's lives, unless it's to tell people about how their data is being used."
"Being transparent about how ads use people's data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook's world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you're doing from your audience," Harada continued. "So, here are some examples of the targeted ads that you'll never see on Instagram. Yours would have been so you."
\u201cSignal made Instagram ads that shows users how much Facebook knew about them.\n\nFacebook banned them.\n\n\u201cBeing transparent about how ads use data is enough to get banned; in Facebook\u2019s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you\u2019re doing.\u201d\n\nhttps://t.co/DwAZeD5IWn\u201d— Sebastiaan de With (@Sebastiaan de With) 1620156004
"Companies like Facebook aren't building technology for you, they're building technology for your data," wrote Harada. "They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives."
"This isn't exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most--dimly concealed within complex, opaquely rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past," he added. "The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible."
Signal's popularity was already soaring before the WhatsApp privacy rollback. According to Business of Apps, the number of Signal users skyrocketed from around half a million at the end of 2019 to about 40 million this January.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Three Dozen Groups Worldwide Call on Facebook to Restore Privacy Protections for WhatsApp Users
Public Citizen and three dozen other social justice, labor, and digital rights organizations from around the globe are calling on Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reverse course on WhatsApp's May 15, 2020 privacy policy revisions. Facebook intends for WhatsApp to contribute directly to its revenues at the expense of user privacy.
May 03, 2021
Public Citizen and three dozen other social justice, labor, and digital rights organizations from around the globe are calling on Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reverse course on WhatsApp's May 15, 2020 privacy policy revisions. Facebook intends for WhatsApp to contribute directly to its revenues at the expense of user privacy.
Facebook has presented WhatsApp users with a devastating ultimatum: Accept our invasive changes or leave WhatsApp forever. The changes will allow Facebook to collect payment and transaction data from WhatsApp users. This means Facebook will be able to gather even more data and target WhatsApp users with ever more personalized ads.
"Facebook must be broken up, not permitted to further integrate the disparate services it never should have been permitted to agglomerate," said Burcu Kilic, digital rights program director for Public Citizen. "This latest move to encroach upon the privacy of WhatsApp users is further proof that Facebook is using exploitative practices and abusing its dominant market power. We call on legislators worldwide to 'Stop Facebook and Save WhatsApp.'"
The new privacy policy endangers one of the most important channels of communication around the globe. The messaging app has two billion users worldwide who rely on WhatsApp to talk to their families, friends, colleagues, and communities. It is the leading messaging app in all but 25 countries, easily outperforming Facebook's signature Messenger app and China's WeChat. And in the U.S. about half of all Latinos use the app, totaling around 32 million users.
Once again, Facebook is set to break the promise it made to users when the tech giant bought the messaging app in 2014. "We are absolutely not going to change plans around WhatsApp and the way it uses user data," Zuckerberg claimed. "WhatsApp is going to operate completely autonomously."
Facebook's broken promises began in 2016. Presenting a routine "update" on WhatsApp's terms and conditions, Facebook was given access to a range of user data for users who did not "opt-out" within 30 days' notice. This included account information, phone numbers, login frequency and duration, information about how users interact with each other, IP addresses, browser details, language, time zone, and more. Although many users opted out, millions were left completely unaware of this option. The approximately one billion WhatsApp users who joined after 2016 were given no choice at all.
The European Union is exempt from Facebook's policy change thanks to privacy protections that are noticeably absent elsewhere. The groups maintain that WhatsApp users everywhere are entitled to the same privacy protections as Europeans.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular