At the latest through the revelations of the US whistle blower Edward Snowden, a widespread narrative established itself: at American internet companies, private data would be monitored, analysed, and stored - and finally forwarded to one of the US intelligences services.
This reservation has now been reinforced: according to a report by the non-profit organisation ProPublica, the messenger service WhatsApp is said to employ more than 1,000 temporary workers to sift through and evaluate messages on a daily basis.
This is despite the fact that the service advertises that the messages are encrypted and thus not visible to anyone. Not even for the parent company Facebook. So they say.
In response to the revelation, Facebook has now admitted that the content of users is indeed processed for identification purposes. It was only content that had previously been identified by an algorithm or by users as child pornography, spam or fraud. Shamed be who thinks evil of it. Source: Morning Briefing G. Steingart, Belin 11.9.2021
