An investigation revealed that Facebook hired more than 1,000 workers to sift through millions of messages on WhatsApp, a global messaging subsidiary with about 2 billion users that has been praised by users for its data encryption network that supposedly kept texts private.
When Facebook purchased the popular WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, both companies assured users that their data could not be accessed by either company, but reporters for ProPublica found that the claims were not true.
In the report, ProPublica found that Facebook had hired contractors in Austin, Texas, Dublin, Ireland and Singapore to look at millions of pieces of users' content.
'These hourly workers use special Facebook software to sift through streams of private messages, images and videos that have been reported by WhatsApp users as improper and then screened by the company's artificial intelligence systems,' the report detailed.
'These contractors pass judgment on whatever flashes on their screen — claims of everything from fraud or spam to child porn and potential terrorist plotting — typically in less than a minute.'
WhatsApp Director of Communications, Carl Woog, told ProPublica that the employees were there to identify and remove 'the worst' abusers from the platform, but said he does not consider the work to be content moderation.
'The decisions we make around how we build our app are focused around the privacy of our users, maintaining a high degree of reliability and preventing abuse,' WhatsApp said in a statement.
WhatsApp Head Will Cathcart, right, said he sees no issue with the platform sharing data that is flagged with law enforcement. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, led the $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 and said its' users' data would remain private
WhatsApp, which boasts more than 2 billion global users, was supposedly keeping messages private and away from the hands of Facebook, unlike its sister company, Instagram
Pictured, Facebook's headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. The tech giant has employees in Dublin and other major cities that sift through data from WhatsApp
Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp, agreed with Woog and said the news was a non-issue.
'I think we absolutely can have security and safety for people through end-to-end encryption and work with law
