On Wednesday, the Texas legal professional basic introduced a far-reaching antitrust case towards Google’s advert enterprise. The grievance makes numerous eye-opening allegations, together with a long-running conspiracy between Google and Fb to defuse the specter of header bidding, however one of many strangest allegations needed to do with WhatsApp. In response to the grievance, Google made a cope with Fb to entry hundreds of thousands of personal messages, and pictures from WhatsApp customers, shortly after the app was acquired.
The precise allegation comes 57 pages into the grievance. The passage is closely redacted, but it surely unmistakably alleges an unique settlement between Google and Fb, granting Google entry to customers’ WhatsApp messages.
That is a unprecedented declare for a few causes. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, which implies Fb didn’t have centralized entry to consumer messages on the time of the acquisition. (That is in distinction to a service like Gmail, the place Google retains the entire messages on its servers and might scan them en masse.) That ought to make it unattainable for Fb to chop this sort of entry deal to a different firm because it doesn’t have entry itself. The entire level of end-to-end encryption is that it’s unattainable for an organization to commerce away consumer privateness on this means.
So… what’s Texas speaking about right here? The clearest rationalization — put forward by Stanford’s Alex Stamos, amongst others — is that the passage is definitely referring to backup recordsdata, that are initiated by the consumer and lie outdoors the service’s end-to-end encryption. However even then, the claims don’t fairly maintain water. Google does make it simple for Android customers to retailer WhatsApp backups on Google Drive — however there’s nothing unique in regards to the deal, and it’s not clear why it could have required a written contract. iOS customers can retailer backups on iCloud too, and in every case, the backup is just created if the consumer initiates it.
Neither Google nor Fb would offer an on-the-record assertion, citing the sensitivity of the continued authorized continuing, however on background, each denied any unique deal to share WhatsApp consumer knowledge. Google additionally pointed to a earlier assertion from Sundar Pichai, the place the CEO dedicated to not utilizing Drive knowledge for promoting.
“We don’t promote your info to anybody,” Pichai wrote in June, “and we don’t use info in apps the place you primarily retailer private content material—similar to Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Images—for promoting functions, interval.”
That leaves us in a troublesome place. This grievance was the results of months of probes to each Google and Fb, which just about actually turned up info that hasn’t been made public. However the redactions and basic confusion across the case make it troublesome to inform how a lot is definitely there.
The thought of a backroom deal to unlock hundreds of thousands of personal messages is just too alarming to disregard, but it surely’s additionally too alarming to simply accept at face worth — particularly when it contradicts a lot of what we find out about how these techniques work. Together with the opposite claims of Fb collusion, this may place an enormous burden of proof on prosecutors because the case goes ahead. However for now at the very least, it appears as if Texas has dropped a bombshell declare with out backing it up.