The company has also confirmed that it reads every chat that gets flagged to the moderator
In what could be extremely discomforting news for a lot of social media users, particularly Facebook users, the technology company has confirmed that it scans the links and images sent by users to each other.
The company has also confirmed that it reads every chat which gets flagged to the moderator, according to a report by Bloomberg. According to the company, it does this in order to ensure the contents are not in violation of the company’s rules and policies.
The confirmation comes from none other than the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview he gave to Vox’s Ezra Klein. Zuckerberg appeared in the interview following a huge uproar after it was revealed that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica illegally mined private information from more than 50 million users in order to influence votes in the 2016 United States presidential election.
During the interview, Zuckerberg recalled an instance where the company received a phone call regarding ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. According to him, it had been brought to the company’s notice that some people were involved in sending ‘sensational messages’ through the Messenger app.
“In that case, our systems detect what’s going on,” Zuckerberg said. “We stop those messages from going through.”
According to the USD 450 billion company, chats on the Messenger app are private. However, the company scans through chats only to avert any misuse and does so using the same tools it uses on the rest of the network. For example, a chat will be scanned only if reported by a user as violation of “community standards”, in which case the company’s “community operations” team reviews the flagged chat.
“For example, on Messenger, when you send a photo, our automated systems scan it using photo matching technology to detect known child exploitation imagery or when you send a link, we scan it for malware or viruses,” a spokeswoman from Facebook Messenger stated. “Facebook designed these automated tools so we can rapidly stop abusive behavior on our platform.”
Some users who were horrified after the reveal took to Twitter to vent their frustration. A user’s post read: Was Facebook reading messages more generally?
The company, which drew a lot of flak recently for misusing and mishandling users’ data, stated that data from the scanned messages are never used to sell targeted ads.
Developed in 2008 as Facebook Chat, Messenger was released by Facebook as a standalone app in 2011. The company also owns messaging app WhatsApp and has more than 2.2 billion active users every month across the world.