Many of us might be using Whatsapp due to its end-to-end encryption feature, which means that only people you’ve given permission can read your messages. But now it looks like its parent company Facebook is trying to get over it and looking for a team of artificial intelligence researchers to find a way to retrieve data from encrypted WhatsApp messages without actually decrypting them.
For those who don’t know, this field of research is referred to as “homomorphic encryption” which enables companies to read and analyze data while keeping it encrypted. And as reported by The Information it will allow Facebook to gather data from chats without infringing the privacy of any individual user. How that would be possible is somewhat unclear.
Some external experts also say that Facebook may be interested in exploring encrypted messages on its WhatsApp platform or could be doing this to deliver targeted advertisements. However, Facebook denied this claim and said, “too soon for us to consider homomorphic encryption for WhatsApp at this time.”
By taking a look at the company’s track record regarding user’s privacy, it’s no surprise that the company is going to do this. Even it will not be wrong if we said that encryption always stood like a wall for Facebook business goals. And to achieve its goals, Facebook is trying to understand the new ways to monetize its extensive data collections.
Certainly, Facebook plans to analyze encrypted WhatsApp messages would cause the exit of many users from the platform and shift to others. We also saw this exit earlier when Facebook updated the WhatsApp policy.
[…] messages are highly encrypted and we have seen that there is a big push from big tech giants (including FB) to develop an AI that can extract information even from the encrypted […]