In-conversation with Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp

[Music] good morning i'm fergus hanson one of the two research directors here at aspie and i run the international cyber policy centre here welcome to this very special aspie event with will cathcart the ceo of whatsapp uh thanks will uh a company that counts over a quarter of the world's population as customers and has only had its 12th i'm fairly certain that will's work would have touched everyone listening in today at least once when he was at facebook he led product development for news feed and in 2018 was the vice president of the facebook app where he oversaw the development and strategy for all facebook app products including video groups marketplace news feeds stories and many more before joining facebook we worked at google and was responsible for a product uh for product development uh of anti-spam technologies uh for google's products including gmail a product i'm particularly grateful for um will it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us this morning and can i thank everyone who is joining this for spending your time with us as well i'll shortly hand over to will to make some opening remarks we'll then uh dive into a discussion together before opening up to your questions um so please get those questions ready uh please vote up other people's questions that you really like and i'll do my very best to get through as many of them as possible uh so with that um can i pass over to you will to to make some opening remarks yeah of course hello everyone good morning thank you fergus so much for hosting me and doing this thank you everyone for joining um yeah so i'm i'm i'm will cathcart from the whatsapp team um you know and i just really wanted to to talk about it it was really a better time to talk about what's going on with whatsapp in particular and private messaging more generally um you know i don't need to tell everyone this but we're increasingly living our lives digitally and covid has accelerated that um you know this event is proof of that i cannot be in australia we cannot be meeting live we're all meeting over the internet um and that's the way we've been living our lives off and on for the last year plus um and you know today we talk to our loved ones our friends we talk to our doctors we work we learn we buy things all digitally we share personal information we share health information we share credit card information and the more this happens the more there is to protect um in the space of messaging the way we think about it as whatsapp is that human beings we're wired that when we talk to someone one-on-one or when we talk to a small group of people we expect that to be private we don't think about whether or not there's going to be a record of what we said that comes out later our social behavior reflects this and this is how people use messaging they message not thinking okay there's gonna be a record of what i say and so that's why we at whatsapp are committed to using the best possible technology and encryption to prevent anyone including us including facebook from seeing your private messages and encryption is so effective that at this point it's become the global standard across financial services across healthcare governments use it technology most private messages sent around the world today are encrypted and we you know this is relevant because we've seen increasingly a number of governments intensifying pressure on tech companies on industry asking to develop back doors to encryption citing unbelievably good reasons like child safety terrorism and thinking that there must be some way to do this without weakening the security of end-to-end encryption um there are legitimate questions about what safety looks like in an encrypted environment but a back door is not the way to solve them i am confident that if there is a back door criminals hackers financial fraudsters and increasingly hostile governments will find ways to exploit it i know that is a very unsatisfying answer everyone wants a solution that solves for the good and prevents the bad but i'm confident it's the honest answer we have ways we can address safety concerns we can talk more about this but whatsapp uses limited categories of information that we have like unencrypted information or metadata we work with law enforcement both to keep people safe without the need to collect a copy and access people's private messages we use a range of techniques from machine learning to making it really easy for people to report or block other users um we we use a bunch of different techniques to detect child exploitative imagery um we actually report quite a lot to the national setting of michigan national center for missing exploited children in the u.s which then liaisons all around the world and we use metadata as just law enforcement some private messaging platforms have deliberately designed their services to do none of this to make all this impossible that's not our goal our goal is to give everyone the safety and security that comes with end to end encryption and then do sophisticated things on top of that to address safety concerns as well i believe collaboration between government industry civil society and academic experts is even more vital to figure out the right approach here and the right balance because different stakeholders see different bits of the puzzle you know the piece i see is how important encryption will be particularly ndn encryption in our lives as more and more of our lives become digital and as there's more threats online with hackers foreign governments hostile actors trying to come after our information so i believe policymakers must embrace the technology that helps keep their citizens communications secure um given the growing cyber threats so i'm very interested to dive deeper into some of the areas that are particularly interesting to you i know there's been many interesting public debates about encryption and would love to hear your take on the conversations as uh too and again thank you for doing this fergus thanks for taking the time great well um thank you so much for those uh opening remarks will and for your time today um let me just maybe start with a couple of framing questions that deal with the geopolitics and some of the big um broader international issues that we're grappling with here so one of them i guess is this um clash that seems to be happening at the moment between governments and technology companies and if you think about the broader context here where there a lot of technological races are becoming geopolitical it feels to me like we're not really setting ourselves up for success here we've got this antagonistic relationship between government and tech companies and i'm just wondering whether you see a path and off ramp there where we can have a more collaborative relationship where governments can work much more closely with the tech industry to try and both deal with some of these challenges that we've we've got and i think everybody agrees on but just more generally i think to have a more collaborative relationship in terms of how we go about this not only with those societal issues we've got to grapple with but winning the big new races that we're we're confronting at the moment whether it's our artificial intelligences you know deployment of that uh quantum computing you name it yeah great point fergus i mean i i think so i think there are a number of areas where um you know private companies working with government can do great things uh and that there's there's no need for it to be antagonistic you know for example one of things we've worked on over the last year year and a half is helping governments provide covid related services over whatsapp you know in australia the government set up a helpline for people to get accurate information about covet we've seen all around the world you know dozens if not hundreds of hundreds at this point of health agencies or governments providing coveted information vaccine information et cetera all over whatsapp we think that kind of thing is great um you know at the same time i i personally believe that it is incredibly healthy for as a private company for governments to be regulating and pushing private companies i think that is an important part of the liberal democratic system um i do think there's areas where we could collaborate on you know in what places should private companies be pushed for example when it comes to the debate around n encryption i i i think a better model would be for the government to be pushing private companies to have much higher levels of security protecting people's data you know i think we should be regulated more strongly to have the strongest possible security not be pushed in the direction of weakening it well let me ask you about that question so this is this arc of fragile democracies that runs basically from below japan across to india and that's really to me in this region seems to be like it's going to be ground zero for uh interference from you know states that want to mess up with that information environment um it's there's they're obviously going through their own growing pains in terms of solidifying you know democratic institutions and alike what is the role for a company like whatsapp in that situation and what is what are you seeing in terms of the mega trends of you know the this swing towards democracy or towards authoritarianism in that really important band of countries in this region yeah i mean i think one of the things that tech plays an important role in is um you know as tech services are successful all around the world they encapsulate um the liberal democratic values of the liberal democracies that they come from either because that's just the culture or because the legal frameworks in those countries require it incentivize it encourage it and i think that's a really good thing you know you look at whatsapp specifically it has made it free um and secure for two billion people to say things to other people that they know um and and you know in australia in the us we kind of can make the mistake of taking for granted that i can say something to someone else in private securely without it being eavesdropped on but that's not true everywhere you know the the founder of what's that beyoncum you know he emigrated from this his family evergreen from the soviet union and you know when when whatsapp announced the addition of end-to-end encryption he talked about remembering growing up in the soviet union when his mother would say oh no that's not a conversation for the phone that's not a phone conversation the fact that now two billion people around the world in in a range of countries have the ability to say things privately free from the fear that their government is going to listen to it is i think a very powerful thing in the promotion of human rights in the promotion of liberal democratic values maybe um that's a good um off-ramp to talk about some of some specifics uh where you're going to be challenged on that particular issue so um if you take the case of hong kong for example um you came out really early on to say that you weren't going to collaborate uh and hand over user data to the authorities when this new law was the national security law was passed there um other companies quickly followed suit there um i understand you know facebooker you know which uh is the owner of whatsapp has got an office there what what's the trajectory there for a company like what's that can you continue to operate in hong kong obviously the the people in hong kong really love the service so i think it's going up in terms of users but what's the trajectory there in hong kong for for your company and what do you think is going to happen with other companies there well i mean you you may be better placed to predict the the overall trajectory in hong kong um you know from my from my perspective we offer secure service um i you know from every thing i've heard from people in hong kong and we've heard people there appreciate that they appreciate they know that if i send them they send a message to someone else we can't see it we don't have a copy of it it's not being monitored um and that's our model and the reality is that um countries choose whether or not to allow that model under their laws i hope that that will continue to be allowed in hong kong i think it brings great um economic benefits that people in hong kong can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world um but the reality is we run the risk of being blocked everywhere we operate we have at times been blocked in mainland china we've walked in other countries um you know we're kind of from our perspective the thing we do is we offer a secure reliable service um and we hope that every country will see the benefit in that but in reality not everyone does so this is this broader um debate that's happening at the moment around tech bifurcation and whether or not companies are going to have to choose between you know whether they stick with the democratic west or or are going to work with an authoritarian china a company like whatsapp is you know obviously staked out but it's going to preserve you know user privacy through entering encryption and not handing over information does that bring you into this debate and force you to stake out a position and is that something that you know you're going to have to you see but being entrenched rather than being weakened over time well you know our position is certainly clear um we've staked it out i actually think this is a a bigger question than what a you know any private company can do or any private technology service can do i think this is really a question for liberal democracies um you know how much of uh what they're focused on you know what australia has spoken on the us et cetera is exporting those values to all of these other countries um and i i think tech services are actually uh um an asset in that and that um you know we go back to our point about collaboration or confrontation with governments either way i think governments uh could push very very hard on tech services spreading and enabling key values in liberal human rights liberal democracies and human rights so another area where this sort of issue around user privacy has come up is india where you if i'm not mistaken you're taking the indian government to court at the moment over this issue of traceability um there's i think there's been similar proposals in brazil around traceability and i'm just wondering could you tell us what traceability is and what your view is on it yeah absolutely so the the traceability the concept the request is that we and other messaging services should change how we operate so that a government could come to us and say here is a message that someone on your service sent we don't know who sent it first but someone sent it please go find out for us who sent it search everyone in the country and tell us who sent it we think that is it's a very dangerous change to end-to-end encryption part of the the security benefit that end-to-end encryption provides is that we don't keep copies of the messages people send we don't have ways to reverse the messages that people send and that provides a security benefit to everyone that they know their messages are not going to be stolen or lost or surveilled um and we think there's real privacy considerations to it being you know possible for someone to go to a tech company and say tell me who first said x um so you know we've been clear about that in india for a number of years there's been an active debate um with the latest regulations around traceability we've challenged them in court as being we believe in consistent with the privacy guarantees in the constitution of india um but more broadly if you look globally i think there's these there's these two debates one around how do we protect from cyber security threats that are growing are they from hackers or hostile governments and we saw the solar winds attack um we you know we at whatsapp saw an attack from the nso group a private company we went public with that a little over a year and a half ago and the other one around should we weaken end-to-end encryption to solve various purposes i believe the conversations need to be together and that end-to-end encryption is an important tool to protect us from the growing cyber security threats that are happening all around the world and what's your what's the response that you get when you raise this type of position with governments around the world are they starting to is this a position starting to resonate or is it a is it still something that's um percolating through policy you know consider processes you know it's it's it's obviously varied country by country and region by region um we've had some important milestones in victories you know in brazil for example it used to be that whatsapp was blocked pretty frequently over the fact that we don't have access to people's messages to turn over um but in recent years we've actually had a number of uh there's been important court decisions it's not all done in brazil but for example an appellate court ruled that encryption was important for protecting human rights people's human rights in brazil but it's mixed you know i wish i could tell you that uh the conversation is all going in one direction obviously it's not obviously there's real debate about it and that's one of the reasons why i was excited to you know speak about it here in australia is i think this is really really important for our future i think we need a secure internet for liberal democracies um and i i get very worried about any suggestion that we weaken that because i think the long-term consequences of that will be grave um just back to india i mean there's a lot of news coming out of india at the moment around it's you know different actions that it's taking in relation to technology companies you know not just u.s companies chinese companies other companies internet shutdowns what's your view at the moment about what what the dynamics are in india um what's going on there you know what what do you think is going to be the trajectory for a company like whatsapp with you know over 400 million users or so there yeah i mean obviously there's a lot of different issues i think you know you are right that um one thing we look very closely at is proposals or changes that would weaken security that would require the collection of more data on people who use our services that would you know involve requests to turn over data we follow rigorous processes there and hold things to high international human rights standards but i hope the trajectory is a positive one you know we have more than 400 million uh users of whatsapp in india that is growing india is growing the economy is growing there is so much opportunity over the next you know number of years decade plus and we'd like to play a small part of that for example you know one of the things we've been able to bring to india and launch the first place we launched it anywhere in the world is payments on whatsapp whatsapp made sending a message or calling someone free and secure what if we can help make financial services free and secure for everyone in many of the countries we operate and there's actually more people who use whatsapp than have access to financial services have that have a bank account and so in places like india we're hopeful we can be part of the economic growth story i'm just reading through some of the questions that are coming through there's some good ones coming up um just just a couple more from me on the end-to-end encryption issue it's it's obviously this hot button issue that uh for governments or lots of governments at the moment can you walk us through what drove you the drivers that drove you to implement in into an encryption on whatsapp yeah whatsapp has always believed deeply in offering a secure service uh and so i think you know the core drivers as security gets better as there's more new stronger security technologies we're going to implement them because we are uh designing the service in a way to protect people's private communication you know what are the drivers of that it comes from a deep-seated belief that human beings should be able to say something to someone else in private in confidence without someone listening in um and that goes you know whether you whether you came from a place like the soviet union or you have a background where you've come from an authoritarian regime or you're just someone who's you know thinking about the future and as we build a more digital technological world are we going to keep the ability that we've had as human beings for hundreds of years to just say things to each other in private without a company looking at it without a government looking at it we believe you should we should keep that we do not think that as the world digitizes we should give up such a fundamental aspect of our privacy and and so on that is is this sort of a false debate that we're having then to say well if it's end-to-end encryption then we're allowing crime to take place on these platforms is there in fact a a different pathway here where there still can be cooperation with law enforcement that doesn't mean opening up everyone's private messages um is that the case or is it a sort of a black and white situation that it's either secure communications or you know uh and crime or you know one or the other i don't think it's a black and white situation at all i think we absolutely can have security and safety for people through end-to-end encryption and work with law enforcement to solve crimes through proper legal process with the information we have and proactively do things you know we you know a lot of the debate for example has been around child safety and the sharing of child exploitative imagery we are by far the industry leaders in finding and detecting that behavior in an end-to-end encrypted service we reported more than 400 000 cases last year of child exploitative imagery to the national center for missing and exploited children for comparison some of the other ndn encrypted services have reported none i think all of apple as a company reported 256 total cases we have 400 000 i think there is a lot we can do but we just believe it starts from recognizing that end-to-end encryption is a necessary security technology today and important and we should have that as a baseline level of protection and then do other things on top of it maybe just on that because it's it is such a um a hot you're an issue that is constantly raised by law enforcement as one of the things that they they want to stop um because you know the the line goes into it encryption is enabling this type of exploitation to occur can you walk people through how it is that you can provide that kind of information to authorities on child exploitation while at the same time not breaking into an encryption absolutely so we don't see people's private messages they're ended and encrypted but there's other information we have a very straightforward one is we make it possible for people to report inside whatsapp if they see a message that is inappropriate or harassing or illegal or spam you know you and i should be able to talk privately without sharing that but if you want if i say something and you want to report it to someone you should be able to so we get those reports we scan them proactively using the best technology on top of that we have other aspects of information that's not the content of your messages what groups are you in what's the name of the group what's the profile photo are there patterns of behavior and between those types of approaches we're able to to ban millions of accounts a month for inappropriate behavior we're able to make reports and when law enforcement you know again following proper legal process and subjects you know all around the world subject to human rights standards we're able to provide the information we do have to law enforcement and they use it to solve crimes one other question around this is could you could you tell us how safety is different on public communication services versus private communication services yeah absolutely we think it's very different because you have to think of the context on whatsapp of you you're talking in a very small group actually over 90 of the conversations are just one-to-one and so the types of um issues that you might have on a large public social network and the types of solutions you might look at on a large public social network aren't appropriate for private messaging you know it's appropriate on a large public social network that if someone posts something that's false and thousands of people are going to see it for that to potentially trigger a fact check warning or some information on that it's not on whatsapp if i call my mom and i say something on the phone it's not appropriate for a robot to listen in and tell me something how we've approached the problem is by looking at how can we change the design of the product to focus on private communication and not the mass spread of information for example it used to be possible to if you saw a message on whatsapp to forward it to all of the threads on whatsapp we changed that and took it away and said you could only forward it to five up to five threads at once that dropped forwards by 25 globally overnight um then at around the time of the start of kovid we added functionality where if a message has been forwarded multiple times we label it differently in the app and you're only allowed to forward it to one thread at a time and that caused those highly forwarded messages to drop by over the majority of them one way i think two-thirds of them went away and more recently we've been working on um uh functionality around helping users access accurate information more easily than they can spread it so in a number of countries now in a number of languages the quick forward button is gone on highly forwarded messages it's been replaced with a google button and the idea is you can go google the message the easiest thing you can do is google the message you've got and find out if it's accurate or not um rather than go forward it on to someone else so we think those kinds of product changes design changes in the product are more appropriate for a private network uh where people are really communicating with each other mostly one to one thank you i'm just going to have a couple more around um i'll ask you a couple questions on misinformation um and and disinformation so whatsapp's been um obviously this is a huge issue for countries all around the world we've seen um accusations around disinformation being spread in the brazilian um election in 2018 we've had misinformation around coronavirus is obviously a global discussion right now i'm just wondering what is the role of what are the changes that you've made at whatsapp beyond you know you mentioned some of them around spreading virality but what kind of effect have they had in terms of what what you've seen in terms of the information environment that's been produced as a result of that i mean it's probably yeah hard to say you know what what didn't happen but um can you talk a little bit about how you what the impact you think that those measures have had yeah absolutely and of course it's hard because again we can't look at people's messages we don't have them um but yeah there's the changes i mentioned so we've made a number of design changes around forwarding we've seen large decreases in how much forwarding is happening across the system you know specifically around um electoral issues as well you know one of the things that had been happening was the reports of people creating lots of fake whatsapp accounts to try and put out push out misinformation well we've over the last few years significantly ramped up our capability to detect cases where people are creating lots of uh fake or inauthentic accounts and automatically ban them you know we now banned millions of accounts a month proactively and that's had a huge shift in the ability for people to go and set up kind of an information farm and pump out information and try to do that over messaging we've also around elections been working with electoral authorities in various countries including brazil you know we're in the more recent elections we've partnered with them we've understood you know what positive information can we help put out fact you know be it fact check services with news organizations electoral information from electoral services also as they as they find instances of information misinformation disinformation you know relaying that to us so we can shut down accounts etc and then lastly we you know we've done work on public education how can we help educate people around the literacy of if you see a rumor should you share it um or should you question it and i think when you look at all of those you know i would never say we've achieved 100 success and i would never promise that that will continue forever because this is an adversarial space but if you look at the more recent elections in places like brazil um i think there's been a huge change in people's estimate of what whatsapp's role was in the information environment compared to what it was years before i'll just ask one final question before i hand over to um these big great questions that people are sitting through and please um continue to send through the questions and vote up each other's uh questions as you go along um but we'll if you've talked about the role of whatsapp you're a messaging platform getting into geopolitics um taking you know some of the most populous countries in the world to court uh having a role in educating people around the world it's it's taken you into all of these different uh sectors that maybe you know would never really envisage when the the platform was created i'm just wondering we're having this debate here in australia around whether you can bake in safety by design into new technologies before they're even created is it even possible to to envisage um what you know how your platform is going to be used in the future when you're design when you're designing and building it so can you bake in those kind of safety features before you start or is it a case that you know there's going to be a constant evolution of people trying to misuse your platform or use it for different purposes that you could never have anticipated and you just have to be agile in responding to that as you go along i think it's both i do not think you can predict every way in which people will use a new technology especially as it achieves scale and i do not believe you can predict every way in which an adversary will try to exploit it but i think you should try um and we certainly try as we as we develop improvements to whatsapp you know all across facebook we try to understand how might this be used how might it be misused let's anticipate that as best we can up front in the design but then once it's out there you need to stay on top of how is your service being used and change over time because the reality is how people use services change and you know on in many unpredictable ways and how people misuse services is obviously impossible to predict completely given how adversarial it is so i think the answer has to be both great well i'm going to turn now to some of the questions that have come in from folks and we've got quite a quite a lot here so um excuse me while i'm back and forth reading these through but i'm going to start with a question from um james kell who said end-to-end encryption is good for most people yet it also enables crime what are what zap's responsibilities there well first of all as i talked about before we believe end-to-end encryption is an important security and safety benefit it also combats crime you know one of the top things we hear about from people and it shows up in survey after survey is that they're worried about their personal information being stolen and we think it's important that people have secure technology um and you know not just for messaging but encryption protects your bank information when you when you use your banking services online when you purchase things online you can only do that because it's secure through encryption we certainly think we have a responsibility to do everything we can above and beyond providing a secure service to mitigate any bad cases to proactive with them and of course to work with law enforcement when uh when when they follow proper legal process with the information we have um you know i think sometimes we we fall into the um the trap of thinking about digital spaces a little differently than physical spaces in physical spaces we've always understood i think that there should be a limit to how much we do to be able to collect information to solve crimes even if it would help in solving some crimes you know we're heading towards a world where lots of people are going to have smart devices in their home they're gonna have screens and cameras i do not believe we should build those devices in such a way that every camera is connected to the internet accessible to the police to access them whenever there's a case i don't think the police should be able to turn on a camera in your in any any living room in the country whenever they whenever they have something they're investigating doing so may solve some crimes but i think the idea that we would all have cameras in our living rooms that the police could look at is horrifying to most people i think in digital spaces that sometimes feel different feels different but it shouldn't i don't think it should be possible to uh to have a central company or a government access any conversation between anyone amongst billions of people in the world um are there going to be some cases where you might have been able to solve a crime if you could of course but there's also going to be other crimes that are created if you do something and there's other huge privacy issues and issues for human rights and liberal democratic values that would undermine if you did something like that yeah i think we don't have to look uh too far afield to see what lengths you can go to in terms of installing cameras all over the place and monitoring people 24 hours to you know what type of world we live in there exactly or in the case of messaging you know we chat it's not end unencrypted messages are monitored there's plenty of examples of people trying to spread valuable truthful information and being told by the government that that's not true or that's not allowed and getting in trouble for it there is a different model out there it's very clear and i think it is the wrong one well this might pivot to a question that's come from from joe what sepsis user privacy is extremely important what about user safety and protection of vulnerable users what is whatsapp's view on its responsibilities in this regard we we view this as core to what we do um and so that's why we do all of the safety work you know a bit of which i talked about before we are industry leaders by far in developing safety solutions in an end and encrypted environment it's why we believe in the importance of event encryption we have a lot of people using whatsapp in parts of the world that are not safe do not have the liberal democratic values of australia that are scary places and we hear from people over and over and over again that knowing that their messages aren't being stored somewhere can't be read can't be accessed remotely is really important to people and other safety benefits for example we let people share we have a feature where you can share your location your current location or your live location with someone else it's entirely unencrypted it's totally secure only the other person can see it people knowing that we don't have a copy of their location is a huge safety benefit for users in those situations and the feature is really valuable people for example all the time will share their location with a spouse or a friend you know if you're taking a taxi and you're scared for your safety share your information so we think the core product is important for this and the fact that it's secure is incredibly important um i'm gonna actually the question i think has had the the most votes and i think it gets to this idea of this debate here around what's the trade-off with a with using a free product um so jordan has asked how does whatsapp make money i.e what value does facebook get from whatsapp great question jordan the short answer is we don't make anywhere near as much money as it costs to develop uh and operate whatsapp we hope to in the future um the the the way we hope to make money in the future is that by having a great free service that consumers love and use um we're increasingly finding that some consumers choose to message businesses you know i don't know about you but you know almost last time you had to call a business and wait on hold uh on the phone for a call center it's a horrible experience or you have to go to a website and it's really slow and complicated well if you can just message a business and get an answer back from them people prefer that and it's better for businesses because it's it's actually lower cost for them and they have happier customers and so we now have over 50 million businesses who use the whatsapp small business app as well as a number of businesses that use our api for large businesses so for example if you want to get a boarding pass from an airline you can have it texted to whatsapp if you want to you know in the number of countries get information on a vaccine or go book your vaccine you can just message on whatsapp and get the vaccine appointment rather than having to call a phone line we generate revenue from that in two ways one is we charge the large businesses for that integration so if you're doing customer service with an airline or getting boarding passes we charge the business free for the consumer charge for the business and the second is those 50 million plus small businesses one of the top things we hear from them is that they would love to have a way to find new customers so we actually encourage them to go try advertising on facebook or instagram not ads on whatsapp but ads on facebook or instagram and those new businesses that are new to the internet and new to advertising uh finding out about facebook advertising obviously generates revenue as well so we hope that those two over the long run will give us a model that means it's a free product for consumers it's secure it has the expectations you want from private messaging and it means that we're generating revenue to run the service as businesses find it valuable thanks will um this is another uh question that's been uh upvoted it's a slightly technical one but it's um i think getting to um where you're headed with the plat with the platform is end-to-end encryption the end point uh or will emerging technologies like homomorphic encryption be implemented as this can now allow analysis on encrypted info which can benefit law enforcement to detect uh child sexual abuse material but also benefit companies with advertising yeah i don't believe end-to-end encryption is the end point i think the reality is that we are in a arms race for security on the internet and the threats are growing by the year they get worse um they're not just hackers they're hostile governments they're scary and so i think security will need to continue to evolve and get better and you know at whatsapp we will keep adding security technology as it becomes available or as we come up with it you know on there sometimes talk about these things like homomorphic encryption or or different ways to to find a you know a magic solution that will both keep people's content so secure but allow law enforcement or companies to access it um there's technical problems with a lot of those things that are out there now but with stepping back from that and just thinking about the trend of technology i'd be wary of things that say hey we can see all the messages just in the good cases but we won't have a way to see all the messages in the bad um the reality is that's usually not how technology works either you can see messages or you can't maybe there'll be some innovative solution but i'd be a little skeptical of it but overall we're just going to keep adding more security as we see threats continue to grow uh we've got another question here from ben which says um why does facebook have a policy of content removal for groups like isis or the russian ira or russia's ira yet what's private encrypted conversations theoretically enable those same actors to potentially plan or execute activities how is this contrast internally viewed from a policy perspective yeah at a high level i mean to be super clear we also have policies against people like isis using whatsapp we do a lot of sophisticated behind the scenes work with the information that we have to detect uh and deactivate and prevent use like that for example looking at information like profile names profile photos group names group photos patterns of behavior patterns of groups that people are in so we are reports that we get from users so don't want to leave you with the impression that that we don't but zooming out i think the fact that there are some policy differences make sense given that talking to thousands of people in a large public space is different and has has always been viewed as different than talking to people privately and one-to-one you know what i'm allowed to call fergus on the phone and say to him privately is different than whether i go publish something on the internet for thousands of people to see and our policies of course reflect that as does the the security and the privacy that we offer we think it's important that private messages be very secure and encrypted and that we should have a copy of it that's different than whether if you post something on facebook for everyone to see we should have a copy of it we've got a question here from um peter and he's asking whether you can explain metadata how does this affect our security great question so metadata it's really a term for information that's not the content of your messages and what it is can range right so if you use whatsapp the ip address that you're using whatsapp is metadata but also the the context that you have or potentially even who you've messaged could be metadata um we don't uh across the board in the normal course of business keep copies of everyone who you're messaging ourselves but that's the kind of thing that's metadata and from a from a safety or security perspective you can imagine law enforcement through proper process getting access to that information you know we know this phone number we was doing something we need to know where it was we can access the ip address through a proper court process and use that to go investigate the case further and we can use it ourselves in some of the proactive safety work we do like that i talked about earlier great thank you um we've got a question here around um the privacy changes that whatsapp announced recently in the um the sharing of user data with um uh facebook with parent company facebook i'm just and there was talking so miguel has said many whatsapp users have switched to arrival server signal after this policy switch does watch that believe it has assuaged user concerns well i think the reality is people have multiple messaging apps on their phone and they use a lot of them and every day we're in a competition for people to choose our service over others um i think we've come a long way in assuaging people's concerns but for the sake of clarity let me just say it here for everyone else or for everyone here our privacy policy update did not change anything about the privacy of your personal conversations and they did not change anything about the rights we have under our policy to share information with facebook what it did was two things one it had a number of transparency and legal updates to our policy which hadn't been updated in a while it did not change anything about sharing and two it describes some new business features we're going to be offering including the ability for businesses large businesses that want to to store messages in the cloud potentially with facebook as one of the options though they'll have other choices um that's a new thing about when you're messaging a really large business so those were the two things that the update did it did not change anything about the privacy of your personal conversations and it did not uh change anything about our ability to share data with facebook clearly we heard a lot of concern clearly we heard a lot of confusion it's our job to communicate this stuff clearly so we've taken that confusion and tried to do our best to communicate clearly we think we've made a lot of progress on that we've seen the overwhelming majority of people go in and choose to accept the new update um we continue to see whatsapp grow um but we're in a competition for people's trust we're in a competition for people wanting to us choosing us as the messaging app that works the best for them um so we'll continue to be really clear about our values really clear about what we're doing and make what's up better great um we had a question from kate and it's in relation to um you know these these arguments that are put up by law enforcement so she says how do you answer law enforcement's position that if a court grants them lawful access to people's private communications through a warrant and you know the the right process uh that law enforcement should be able to read their encrypted messages yeah of course it's very simple we believe that law enforcement working at the right process should have access to the information that we have and that's why we work with law enforcement we provide that information we do not believe that we should intentionally weaken the security of whatsapp and go keep a copy of everyone's messages which is what would be required them to be able to come with a with a warrant or through proper process and have us give our people messages we don't think people want whatsapp keeping a copy of everyone's messages all around the world we don't think that's the right thing to do and we think that work week in security and you know to the to the broader point about should we um should we accept trade-offs to do that i think as a society we've always understood that there are trade-offs in what how we build our security systems where we draw privacy lines and the answer isn't always we should do everything possible to give police access to 110 of the information out there we shouldn't put a camera in everyone's living room so that the police can watch when they have a case would help solve some crimes would make us less safe and would be a very very scary experience and we feel the same way about messaging we don't think we should change it so we have a copy of everyone's messages we've got a follow-up here from uh stuart garrion who's uh it's a follow-up to jordan's question about um how face how whatsapp makes money and he said um are you able to talk about um the current revenue where the majority of that comes comes from do you have a few examples that could illustrate the sort of model at the moment yeah it's the two example great question it's the two examples i talked about which is uh businesses that use whatsapp choosing to run ads on facebook or instagram and specifically to go in more detail um there are at you can run an ad on facebook that points to a website you can run it out on facebook that points gives out your phone number or now you can run an ad on on facebook where the button says message me on whatsapp and this is better for consumers because they prefer to talk to businesses over whatsapp it's better for the business because it performs better and it means facebook generates more revenue of the two we make more money from that and then the second one which uh is is growing very quickly is for large businesses when they use our api to integrate they pay us a fee per conversation that happens so those two are where the revenue comes from um so it's they're not just examples they are where the revenue comes from um we've got a question here about um scaling and and government regulation so um thomas has said how does whatsapp think about scaling in an era where countries are increasingly regulating technologies in their own ways will this impact future innovation potentially i mean i you know i think as we talked about before i think there's nothing wrong actually it's a great model in in liberal democracies the government's regulate companies i think that's really really helpful and healthy and as you know as a consumer and a citizen i love that what the regulations are obviously matter you know we've been talking a lot about um the debate around regulations around back doors to n encryption i would love to see more examples of governments regulating us to have to provide stronger security to have to do more around data protection um but yeah i mean obviously the reality depends on the specific regulation and of course you know we we have opinions and thoughts and can go into any you know specific area if it's helpful for people and people do want to hear our opinion but if they do but um but broadly i think it really just depends um we've got a question here from um aim who i assume may be an academic um the question is how can whatsapp better collaborate with the academic community in advancing research on whatsapp itself that's a great question and you know maybe i'd even turn that around to you which we would love to hear more from academics about you know what we could be doing to help with academic research um you know one area that we've we've been paying a lot of attention to obviously over the last few years is misinformation um and one of i didn't talk about it before but one of the things we've done there is work with partners there's been more journalistic institutions but it could be academics as well to offer fact check lines so if i see something in whatsapp can i forward it on to a number and then find out whether or not what was said was true or false obviously not everyone's going to do that not everyone's going to forward something they get onto a fact check line but that can be a powerful source of research i think that for example there might be really interesting opportunities to understand what kinds of misinformation or misunderstandings are people saying privately to each other by having some people forward those on and could you do research on that and understand the information ecosystem and could that shape our public messaging be it around health or elections or other topics to the community at large through other channels through mass media by better understanding what people are saying privately again without our ability needing to be able to see anyone's messages without changing anyone's privacy expectations um we've got a question around some um staffing from melissa but it fell into a question that i i didn't get to answer ask early on some i'd ask a couple around this um you're now a company with over two billion users uh globally um you know a quarter of the world's population if you compare that with a you're a large technology a large telecommunications company that might be you know a quarter million staff what's the the staffing footprint of a company like whatsapp and melissa has specifically asked how many staff does whatsapp have for investigations of user reports yeah i guess i mean overall you know i think if you're comparing with the hundreds of thousands model from before it is smaller than that um the reality of the internet and the technological infrastructure of it is you can create these things with very small teams and support them at first with very small teams so there's messaging startups that are you know single digits of people we've scaled to be bigger than that um you know there's not there's a lot of people across facebook who help with whatsapp but i think if you look at people who who work kind of full time on whatsapp it's above a thousand uh you know won't get into the full breakdown on customer service user reports engineering etc but it's a lot of that um and i think um you know i think the reality is we can scale this service very quickly but we have a lot of work we need to do to improve it for people a lot of work to do the proactive safety work i talked about and work to you know react user reports to be able to help so that's what drives the increase over a small startup which is a few people great um judy's asked with the growing ability of inauthentic accounts to act like authentic accounts how can whatsapp prevent disinformation uh into the future yeah i mean the we've done a lot of work on on detecting inauthentic accounts you know keep in mind when you sign up for whatsapp you need to provide a phone number you need to verify that phone number so when they're you know that's a barrier right there but there are people out there who will go buy and bulk lots of phone numbers and we use a lot of sophisticated techniques with the data we do have to detect that and ban it and i think it's a really important part of the story is we we actually do it is a bit of a cat and mouse game but we need to do the work and we've made a lot of progress on it that's why we banned millions of accounts a month we need to do the work to detect that and make it very very hard for someone to go create a lot of accounts that combined with the design changes we've made to whatsapp so it's not a place where you can easily forward information on to everyone all at once combined makes it a much harder i think surface for disinformation attackers to go after i've got a question here from um william and he said um i'm gonna sort of have to interpret this for a little bit because i think he's not meeting the question is what futures uh future features uh sorry what future features are you able to envisage and describe and where's the trajectory i suppose for whatsapp given that the evolution that you've already gone on as a company so far over uh just over a decade where do you see it going if you look out say the next you know the next decade yeah well we think there's a long way from where we are to replicating a face-to-face conversation our dream with whatsapp is that it is just as easy to have a conversation with someone else over whatsapp as it would be in person and we all know how far away we are from that i mean this year having to have conversations over you know be it over whatsapp or zoom or any of the other services we know how far apart it is so we think there's a lot of improvements we can make to whatsapp a couple examples i'll give you one is um if you and i have a conversation in person we don't usually keep permanent transcripts of the conversation yeah end-to-end encryption help solve the problem we don't usually have someone eavesdropping on the conversation but with messaging services you still kind of keep a record so we're adding a lot of functionality around letting you send messages that don't live forever in whatsapp you can now set a thread to have everything go away every after seven days because you don't want to keep a permanent record we're going to be soon adding the ability for you to send a photo maybe you're sending your credit card info or bank information send a photo that the other person can only view once and then it automatically goes away things like that over time another area is calling we've been working hard over the last year to make video calling better not surprisingly video calling grew very quickly on whatsapp this last year as people turned to it to talk to people when they couldn't be in person so we're supporting more people we've made a number of quality improvements we added desktop calling recently for one-to-one calls would love to support it for group calls and the last area i'll point to is payments you know we now have payments live in india and brazil and the idea is just as whatsapp revolutionized communication by making it free and secure to talk to someone can we do the same thing for financial services and make it so that if you're sending money maybe you're an expatriate you're sending money home to your country can you send that home for free or cheaply rather than for a really really expensive fee which is how it works for a lot of people today great thank you will i might just ask one question just to wrap up um one of the fascinating things i found my own personal experience with whatsapp is i was back in the days when we were allowed to travel um and i went to argentina um everybody started sending me messages instead of text i was getting voice memos and you're constantly holding your phone up to your head trying to you know listen to everyone's voice members do you see a sort of the full spectrum of human um differences uh reflected in is there is a very wide differences in usage that you see between one country and the other and age groups is it the whole panoply of human difference uh reflected on the platform there absolutely are i love this question not everyone realizes this unless you've seen it but voice memos are incredibly popular on whatsapp um billions of them are sent every single day and it gets to the idea of the differences in all of our experiences you know a lot of a lot of people who use whatsapp have never used a desktop computer before a lot of people who use whatsapp use it in a language that's hard to type on on your phone a lot of people use whatsapp surprising where people use whatsapp aren't fully literate um and so the ability to just quickly and easily send a voice memo rather than try to type something out if you've never used a computing device before is really really really powerful and so yeah we absolutely see that variation all around the world it's a lot of what gets me and the team excited as we go talk to people in different parts of the world who use whatsapp and learn from them how they do it and what we can do to make it better and that's what drives a lot of the improvements we work on well i'm going to um of clozier i want to thank everybody for um the incredible number of questions you sent through uh it was it was great to have uh your engagement in this and will i wanted to to thank you especially for for taking the time to to speak with us today to answer so many questions and to cover such a massive spectrum of issues fergus thank you so much for doing this thank you to aspi and everyone thank you for tuning in i know it took time out of your workday to join and ask all these wonderful great questions thank you

Channel: ASPICanberra

Views: 1,258

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: aspi, whatsapp

Id: 2KBQCsLDoBA

Length: 56min 23sec (3383 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021