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Thursday, January 28, 2021

WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications

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Vaishnavi Krishna Mohan
Vaishnavi Krishna Mohan
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Vaishnavi Krishna Mohan

Article Title

WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

January 28, 2021

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Representative Image WhatsApp

Representative Image WhatsApp | Source: Rachit Tank via Unsplash

According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”

This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.

Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.

To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.

However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.

It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’

A person using WhatsApp | Source: Andrés Rodríguez via Pixabay

By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.

The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…

Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:

“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.

They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.

They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”

Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives.  When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.

In WhatsApp’s words:

“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”

In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.

Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.

Gen. Michael Hayden | Source: Wikimedia

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”

In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.

In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.

In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.

Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.

Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.

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February 4, 2021 4:44 PM

World's largest graveyard of Dinosaurs found in South Africa

In a village in the eastern cape of South Africa lies one of the most significant dinosaur sites ever found in the world. The site was discovered when a shepherd, Dumangwe Thyobeka found a large bone on his way to his great-grandparents’ graves, in 2015. He then took the bones to a local dinosaur enthusiast, James Rhalene. Commenting on this discovery " Mr. Rhalene said, "Growing up we were told dinosaurs were a myth, I thought they were only tales our grandparents would tell around the fire at story time", and It wasn't until reading some books that I started to believe they may be real. I've been looking into the existence of dinosaurs since 1982. He added, "You can imagine my excitement at being part of this and discovering them in my own backyard. I am so proud. Books will be written about our small village; the world will come to know of us through this discovery.”

These bones are more than 200 million years old, of around the end of the Triassic era and the beginning of the Jurassic one. When the village elder, Sginyane Ralane came to know about the discovery, he reached out to universities in South Africa for looking into it. The news eventually reached Prof. Jonah Choiniere from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and in 2018 Jonah and his colleagues started excavating the site. “It has been one of those places where you sometimes find yourself literally tripping over a dinosaur bone. There are very few other sites I've had the chance to work where we have this richness of fossils.” says Prof Paul Barett, a dinosaur expert at The Natural History Museum, UK, after he joined the team.

A reason why this area is abundant in fossils, Natural History Museum explains, is because of the ancient river systems in the area. The area is arid for most of the year now, and the rivers flow only seasonally. However, in the ancient times, there were vast river systems flowing year-round in the region, with wide, shallow rivers which would consequently form a layer of rock 210 million years old which is up to 500 meters thick in some regions. These rivers supported diverse wildlife, including ancestors of crocodiles, possibly those of turtles and mammals and fish, amphibians and reptile-like animals. The existence of such large rivers meant that dead animals nearby would be buried in sediment before they decomposed.  

This discovery is scientifically important for a number of reasons; the era from which these bones are found is a boundary in which a mass extinction occurred. Prof. Jonah is trying to understand how the animals from before that extinction survived and how they flourished after. In the Triassic era, there were multiple dominating animals, like the crocodiles, big mammal-like animals and dinosaurs. In the Jurassic era, however, the dinosaurs are clearly dominating. Why this happened is unclear, and the rocks and fossils from this site might help with that. There were also other animals along with dinosaurs in this site which make it noteworthy. Of the animals found, there were rauisuchians, which relate to modern-day crocodiles, and were dominant on land during the Triassic. The team also found cyclodonts and dicyclodonts, where the cyclodonts are the early ancestors to all mammals, and dicyclodonts are an even earlier branch of the mammalian family tree.

All of these have a significant impact on the community too; the team signed a memorandum of understanding with the local government with huge. After the signing, local officials visited the site at Qhemega. The team has been trying to use the heavy machinery they had brought for moving fossils for improving access in and to the village. They are also developing a curriculum in high schools to include topics about fossil sites and to add geography to the curriculum, to train the younger generation about the mapping used in excavation and in many other scientific fields especially relevant in the mineral-resource rich South Africa.

So far, this site has only provided benefits for everyone involved; new discoveries and confirming data for the scientific community, and economic access, increased opportunities and a matter for pride for the local community.

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