Prosecutors say Google accessed private WhatsApp messages — but the evidence is thin

On Wednesday, the Texas United States Attorney General announced a far-reaching antimonopoly case against Google's ad business. The charge makes a lot of eye-curtain raising allegations, including a long-running conspiracy between Google and Facebook to defuse the threat of header bidding, but one of the strangest allegations had to DO with WhatsApp. Accordant to the ill, Google made a deal with Facebook to access millions of private messages, and photos from WhatsApp users, shortly after the app was acquired.

The specific allegement comes 57 pages into the ailment. The passage is heavily redacted, but it unmistakably alleges an exclusive agreement between Google and Facebook, granting Google access to users' WhatsApp messages.

*An excerpt from p57 of the Texas v. Google complaint.*

This is an sinful take for a mate of reasons. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, which means Facebook did not have centralized admittance to user messages at the time of the acquirement. (This is in line to a overhaul like Gmail, where Google retains all of the messages connected its servers and sack scan them en masse.) That should make it impossible for Facebook to turn off this rather access code deal to other company since it doesn't have access itself. The whole point of end-to-end encoding is that it's impossible for a company to trade away user privacy therein way.

So... what is Texas talking about here? The clearest account — put forward by Stanford's Alex Stamos, among others — is that the passage is actually referring to backup files, which are initiated by the substance abuser and lie outside the service's end-to-close encryption. But even then, the claims don't quite guard water system. Google does nominate it painless for Android users to store WhatsApp backups on Google Drive — but there's nothing alone roughly the bargain, and information technology's not clear why information technology would stimulate required a holographic contract. iOS users nates store backups on iCloud too, and in each case, the patronage is only created if the user initiates it.

Neither Google nor Facebook would provide an on-the-record financial statement, citing the sensitivity of the ongoing legal proceeding, simply along downpla, both denied any undivided deal to share WhatsApp user information. Google likewise pointed to a past statement from Sundar Pichai, where the CEO wrapped up to not exploitation Drive information for advertizement.

"We wear't trade your information to anyone," Pichai wrote in June, "and we don't purpose information in apps where you primarily store person-to-person content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."

That leaves us in a difficult place. This complaint was the resultant role of months of probes to both Google and Facebook, which almost certainly turned raised information that hasn't been made public. But the redactions and widespread mix-up or so the case make it difficult to tell how a good deal is actually there.

The idea of a backroom softwood to unlock millions of private messages is too alarming to ignore, but information technology's also too alarming to accept at nominal value — especially when it contradicts then much of what we know about how these systems work. Along with the other claims of Facebook collusion, this will place a massive burden of test copy happening prosecutors as the case goes forward. But for directly at least, information technology seems as if Texas has dropped a bombshell lay claim without backing it up.