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Facebook reportedly looking at how to analyse encrypted data for targeted ads

This week a concerning report was published by The Information (paywall) in which it alleges that the social media giant Facebook is looking to decipher encrypted data in order to serve up targeted ads.

As much as the platform likes to deny it, advertising is a crucial part of the Facebook business model these days and now the company may be placing targeted ads in more of the applications it owns.

In this particular case it is WhatsApp, which Facebook has resisted the temptation of placing ads in for some time now, but this report suggests that could change.

To that end a team of AI researchers is being put together with the objective of analysing data without having to break encryption, which is referred to within the industry as homomorphic encryption. Given that all conversations on WhatsApp are encrypted end-to-end, this could present a significant change in policy.

As Engadget points out, Facebook is not alone in developing skills in this field, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google also said to be working on it.

If that is indeed the case, much of the privacy-focused initiatives and transparency that has been espoused for a couple of years now, would be for nothing.

When asked about its pursuit of homomorphic encryption, a Facebook spokesperson told The Information that it is, “too early for us to consider homomorphic encryption for WhatsApp at this time.”

While the objective of homomorphic encryption is designed to analyse data while keeping encryption intact, how users would feel about big tech companies poking around their chats and messages that were once believed to be secure, remains to be seen.

We already saw a mass exodus from WhatsApp when Facebook announced changes for business accounts on the platform and people finding out that encrypted chats can still be scraped for data may not go down well.

Regardless of how many targeted ads Facebook wants to send the way of its users, privacy and security of data needs to remain top of mind.

[Image – Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash]

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