The debate about online privacy versus the battle against crime was given new life this week with an attempt in Brazil to ban the popular messaging application WhatsApp.
A well-known and strict judge in a regional area of Brazil issued a court order banning WhatsApp for 72 hours in the whole country on Monday, because of problems he was having getting information from the company that owns the app.
That company is Facebook, which bought the app for $19 billion in 2014, and it was allegedly not cooperating by handing over data from customers in a drug-running case that the judge was presiding over.
One Billion Users
The app has become very popular with smartphone users in many parts of the developing world since it provides a free messaging service that rivals SMS.
In February this year, the company said the app was used by one billion people, nearly one in seven people on the planet. The number of users in Brazil is said to be about 100 million people.
But the issue with WhatsApp and other similar apps, including Wickr, is that they guarantee end-to-end encrypted communications. It’s this feature that is very popular with those who value personal privacy.
For criminals, it provides a secure channel for avoiding surveillance of any kind. The only way their planning and operations can be accessed by law enforcement agencies, if they are communicated via WhatsApp, is with the cooperation of the company holding the data.
But Facebook says it has no power to access the user data anyway. This case appears to echo the same sentiments as those displayed in the recent Apple versus FBI mobile phone incident.
WhatsApp’s co-founder and CEO Jan Koum issued a statement via Facebook explaining why it did not have the data the court was requesting:
Yet again millions of innocent Brazilians are being punished because a court wants WhatsApp to turn over information we repeatedly said we don’t have. Not only do we encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people’s information safe and secure, we also don’t keep your chat history on our servers. When you send an end-to-end encrypted message, no one else can read it—not even us.
Different Cultures
The case is another instance of the lack of clarity between large U.S.-based telecoms and social media companies over collaboration and cooperation with international governments.
The issue of access to and use of data collected from social media is again happening in a framework of different cultures, varying unexplored attitudes to privacy and within authoritarian legislative systems.
This case had a short term (and potentially longer term) and successful conclusion. The WhatsApp suspension was lifted after 24 hours by another judge.
But this is not the first time the WhatsApp service has been banned in Brazil. In December 2015, it was banned for 48 hours. This was also lifted after about 12 hours.
