Facebook COO: WhatsApp encryption helps governments combat terrorism
FACEBOOK COO Sheryl Sandberg has defended Facebook’s use of encryption in its popular messaging service WhatsApp, telling a BBC radio show that what limited data remains accessible can be useful to law enforcement as its seeks to thwart terrorist activity.
When communications are encrypted, only the sender and intended recipient can read the message. But information about an encrypted conversation, like who is contacting who, would still be available to governments during a terrorism investigation, even if the contents of the conversation would not.
“The goal for governments is to get as much information as possible,” she said during an interview Sunday on the show “Desert Island Discs.” “And so when there are message services like WhatsApp that are encrypted, the message itself is encrypted but the metadata is not, meaning that you send me a message, we don’t know what that message says, but we know you contacted me.”
While major technology companies including Apple, Google, and Facebook have touted the benefits to privacy and security that encryption offers, law enforcement officials in the United States and abroad say that encrypted messaging services give criminals and terrorists a safe haven in which to operate.
For instance, in a March vehicle attack outside British Parliament that killed four pedestrians and a police officer, the perpetrator, Khalid Masood, was revealed by British media to have been communicating on WhatsApp just minutes beforehand. In response, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd described the use of encrypted communications as “completely unacceptable.”
“We need to make sure organizations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other,” Rudd said. It remains unclear, however, whether Masood’s use of WhatsApp was relevant to his crime.
Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, recently met with Rudd and said on the radio show, “We are very aligned in our goals.”
“We want to make sure all of us do our part to stop terrorism and so our Facebook policies are very clear. There’s absolutely no place for terrorism, hate, calls for violence of any kind,” she said.
Sandberg warned that if encryption was stripped away, users might flee the service, leaving law enforcement officials with even fewer leads. “If people move off those encrypted services to go to encrypted services in countries that won’t share the metadata, the government actually has less information, not more,” she said. — Washington Post