Prosecutors say Google gained access to WhatsApp’s private messages – but the evidence is sparse

On Wednesday, a Texas attorney general announced a widespread antitrust case against the Google advertising industry. The complaint raises many eye-opening allegations, including a long-running conspiracy between Google and Facebook to thwart the threat of headline claims, but one of the strangest allegations related to WhatsApp. According to the complaint, Google entered into a contract with Facebook to access millions of private messages, and photos from WhatsApp users, shortly after the app was launched.

The specific allegation covers 57 pages of the complaint. The passage has largely re-emerged, but it inevitably demands a separate agreement between Google and Facebook, allowing Google to access users ’WhatsApp messages.

This is an amazing application for one reason or another. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that Facebook did not have centralized access to users ’messages at the time of construction. (This is in contrast to a service like Gmail, where Google keeps all messages on its servers and can scan them en masse.) That should make it impossible for Facebook to type cut this access contract to another company since it does not own access. The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that it is impossible for a company to trade user privacy in this way.

So … what is Texas talking about here? The clearest definition – promoted by Alex Stamos at Stanford, among others – that the passage actually refers to backup files, which are initiated by the user and are outside end-to-end encryption of the service. But even then, the claims don’t completely hold water. Google is making it easy for Android users to store WhatsApp backups on Google Drive – but there’s nothing special about the deal, and it’s not clear why a written contract would be needed. iOS users can also store a backup on iCloud, and in all cases, the backup will only be created if the user initiates it.

Neither Google nor Facebook would make an on-board statement, citing the vulnerability of the ongoing legal proceeding, but in the background, the two refused a specific contract for sharing WhatsApp user data. Google also cited a previous statement from Sundar Pichai, where the CEO promised not to use Drive data for advertising.

“We will not sell your information to anyone,” Pichai wrote in June, “and we will not use information in apps where you store most personal content – such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos – for advertising purposes, time. ”

That leaves us in a difficult place. This complaint was the result of months of probes to Google and Facebook, which certainly turned up information that was not publicly published. But the general perception and confusion about the issue makes it difficult to say what the level is.

The idea of ​​a backroom deal to solve millions of private messages is too scary to ignore, but it’s also awful to accept it at face value – especially when it goes against so many of the we know how these systems work. Along with the other allegations of Facebook bias, this will place a huge burden of proof on prosecutors as the case progresses. But for now at least, it seems as if Texas has abandoned the bombshell claim without its support.