WhatsApp – News Agency nabakhabar

Is WhatsApp becoming a workplace dystopian tool?

News Agency nabakhabar — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:16:11 +0000

This article was birthed out of an initial message sent out by Mamun (from the Aurora team) to the author. One re-pitch, three missed deadlines, two rewritings and eight follow-ups later, it finally comes to life as the words you are reading now.

All this back and forth happened, quite conveniently, on the ubiquitous tool that is WhatsApp. From a purely productivity and work point-of-view, what a wonderful piece of tech, eh? An easy-to-use platform facilitating instant connections to billions of people anywhere in the world and for free!

Too bad I hate it with every fibre of my being. Let me tell you why.

Before you can understand my beef with WhatsApp, we have to go back to when all the cool kids had Blackberrys and social plans were made on BBM. Details are blurry, but I am guessing I was still rocking a dated Nokia, or maybe I had just switched to my first Android phone. As a platform-agnostic messaging service, I felt WhatsApp was a godsend. As it began to pick up features, I became deeply embedded into the little green icon cult; converting friends and family to the app and evangelising it for its use for both work and play.

In the golden words of Michael Scott, “How the turntables…”

As does WhatsApp, no other communication medium (sans hounding a person physically) raises as high the expectation for an immediate response. Even with good old-fashioned phone calls, you could expect people to reject calls or not pick up; you could be in a meeting or having lunch. If you were savvy, you would be able to reject the call with a message like “I’ll call you later,” and that’s fine.

In WhatsApp, however, there is no autoresponder to cover for you. Because reading and responding to a WhatsApp message can be done so discreetly, there is this creeping responsibility to respond to messages irrespective of whether you are focused on something else at that moment. Nights, weekends, OOO (out of office) – none of these have any bearing on whether you are expected to go through your WhatsApp. Sure, you can blame it on an overall Pakistani “yes man” work culture thing – but there is no denying that tools like these exacerbate the situation.

The same perceived urgency to respond has been addressed in work messaging tools like Slack. You can turn notifications off to indicate that you have logged off and therefore will not be able to revert. There are studies and campaigns that address the issue of this always-on responsiveness and its effects on mental health. Some tools, like Basecamp, purposefully remove green dots depicting “online” status, so that other people’s unrealistic expectations of availability are curbed.

Before you tell me that WhatsApp affords the same via its ‘read receipts’ opt-out feature, let me set the matter straight. Its optionality makes it problematic. Removing the ‘read’ blue ticks and replacing them with the ambiguous grey ones feels almost offensive in the Pakistani work environment. When you do that, you feel you are hiding something on purpose. It’s a nonverbal flex that says I don’t trust you, therefore I will not let you know that I have read your message.

This is why a lot of people keep those blue ticks on, but just don’t read the messages; they kind of hack their way around it. For example, they will glance at the message through the notifications dropdown and never read it in the app. Nobody wants to trigger those blue ticks until they are ready to properly process and respond to the message. Other hacks include making a new widget (at least in Android phones) where the messages will be previewed without you having to go through them. I was one of those people before I moved to the grey tick side. I used to go to extreme lengths to make sure someone else could not tell that I had read their message – so that I could feign ignorance until I found enough brain space to tackle their issue and type out a response.

If that were not enough, WhatsApp groups compound the problem. Now you have bosses and the whole chain of command ‘invited’ to the group as well, and it becomes a two-pronged problem – from the junior people’s side and the management’s. Add in another ‘team’ or side, like a client or a vendor, and you are primed for chaos.

For junior folk, the fact that people higher up the ladder are in the group means that they cannot converse as freely as they would with their peers. Every word is measured, lest it invokes the wrath of the ‘senior people’ who mostly avoid the conversation, but can swoop in and make a mountain out of a molehill any time they want. For more senior people stuck in these groups as ‘overlookers’, it becomes a daunting task to follow all those conversations back and forth and try to ensure any kind of quality control. I have 52 work-related WhatsApp groups that I don’t want to be a part of, let alone monitor, but am being held hostage in because if I exit it will be considered an abandonment of sorts.

These groups also play host to a bunch of oops moments. Who amongst us has not accidentally sent that rant about the boss – intended for your ‘unofficial’ office group – to the wrong window? Thank goodness for ‘delete for all’ eh? But wait, now it looks even more suspect. Unless someone has already managed to take a screenshot and now you are screwed.

Empires now crumble with WhatsApp screenshots.

As a matter of fact, if you are working in Pakistani marketing, you know just how important WhatsApp groups have become to the fabric of our business. “Let’s make a group and start the convo there” has become as critical a pillar of business engagement as an SLA (service level agreement) or a contract.

The people at Meta are super smart because they keep adding these wonderful features that let people in our part of the world use WhatsApp as a business tool – but stop just short of making it a real deal. Now we have a nice desktop client, but it doesn’t play well with other comms tools, like email or teams or Slack – how hard would it be to make an API (application programming Interface) and plug it in?

Even better, why doesn’t WhatsApp let me turn random work requests into to-dos in my project management software? While we are at it, sync it to my calendar so I don’t have to chase people around for appointments. The last frontier for WhatsApp is to be able to ‘share screens’ and it will make Zoom et al irrelevant in an instant. We have seen how the devs can seamlessly integrate into map apps, so why not this? Hey Meta, maybe you should abandon the Facebook-based Workplace suite and create a biz framework atop WhatsApp instead.

When messages don’t cut it, we love sending voice notes. I know some people who handle work conversations exclusively through a litany of voice notes. To me, it is just excruciating going through these. The 2x button helps, but still. It’s easy to be ambiguous in voice notes, so it makes for a poor feedback tool. I am embarrassed to admit that I often ask someone to transcribe these long voice notes into text so that I can visualise and address them properly.

Sometimes, because it seems to be a ‘less formal’ platform, I receive messages from people (in my personal circle) who feel like asking for creative advice for their brand problem (which is my bread and butter, by the way) via WhatsApp, which then becomes a fairly innocuous way to get a freebie consultation; they know that if they emailed instead, it would sound more business-like and bound to incur a charge. I work in the Pakistani agency space so I am no stranger to spec work and free ideas, but WhatsApp in a business setting facilitates these practices.

Lest you be bored by my vitriol about this otherwise brilliant piece of software (and because Meta is a client. Yikes!), let me be absolutely clear. The problem is not with WhatsApp. By design, WhatsApp does not discriminate between the personal you and the work you. It is our work culture – the one that does not support boundaries that makes this tool so problematic for me. So please do hesitate to contact me, at least on WhatsApp. And if you already have my number, please pay heed to my WhatsApp ‘status’ before you ping me. Also, maybe share this article with a friend on WhatsApp?

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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down in global outage

News Agency nabakhabar — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 18:11:23 +0000

Facebook Inc has said it is working to restore access to its social media platforms, including photo-sharing platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, after an apparent global outage.

The platforms were down for tens of thousands of users on Monday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The website was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington, DC, and Paris, with problems being reported from about 15:45 GMT.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” A similar message confirming the outage also was posted on WhatsApp’s Twitter account.

The error message appearing on Facebook.com read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Al Jazeera could not immediately confirm what was affecting the platforms.

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Reuters and AFP news agencies on the outage.

The error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error, Reuters reported.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

But the outage might be affecting more users. WhatsApp was also down for more than 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.

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WhatsApp delays data sharing change after backlash

News Agency nabakhabar — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 19:37:24 +0000

WhatsApp on Friday postponed a data-sharing change as users concerned about privacy fled the Facebook-owned messaging service and flocked to rivals Telegram and Signal.

The smartphone app, a huge hit across the world, canceled its February 8 deadline for accepting an update to its terms concerning sharing data with Facebook, saying it would use the pause to clear up misinformation around privacy and security.

“We’ve heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.

“This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook.”

It said it would instead “go-to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15.”

The update concerns how merchants using WhatsApp to chat with customers can share data with Facebook, which could use the information for targeted ads, according to the social network.

“We can’t see your private messages or hear your calls, and neither can Facebook,” WhatsApp said in an earlier blog post.

“We don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling. We can’t see your shared location and neither can Facebook.”

Location data along with message contents is encrypted end-to-end, according to WhatsApp.

“We’re giving businesses the option to use secure hosting services from Facebook to manage WhatsApp chats with their customers, answer questions, and send helpful information like purchase receipts,” WhatsApp said in a post.

“Whether you communicate with a business by phone, email, or WhatsApp, it can see what you’re saying and may use that information for its own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Facebook.”

Technology experts note that WhatsApp’s new requirement of its users makes legally binding a policy that has been widely in use since 2016.

Facebook aims to monetize WhatsApp by allowing businesses to contact clients via the platform, making it natural for the internet giant to centralize some data on its servers.

Countries concerned

The Turkish Competition Authority said it is opening an investigation and requiring WhatsApp to suspend the data-sharing obligation on its users.

Several Turkish state organizations—including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s media office—switched to Turkcell telecom’s new messaging service BiP in response.

The terms of service tweak also put WhatsApp in the crosshairs in Italy and India, where a petition has been filed in a Delhi court.

WhatsApp’s notice to users lacked clarity and its privacy implications need to be carefully evaluated, Italian data protection agency GPDP said in a post on its website.

GPDP said it has shared its concerns with the European Data Protection Board and reserved the right to intervene in the matter.

Facebook has come under increasing pressure from regulators as it tries to integrate its services.

The EU fined the US social media giant 110 million euros (then $120 million) for providing incorrect and misleading information about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp concerning the ability to link accounts between the services.

Federal and state regulators in the US have accused Facebook of using its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram to squelch competition and filed antitrust lawsuits last month that aim to force the company to divest them.

Privacy paramount

User privacy fears have been mounting, with Uber careful to stress that a change in app terms taking effect on January 18 has nothing to do with sharing data.

Encrypted messaging app Telegram has seen user ranks surge on the heels of the WhatsApp service terms announcement, said its Russia-born founder Pavel Durov.

“People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services,” Durov said without directly referring to the rival app.

Encrypted messaging app Signal has also seen a huge surge in demand, helped by a tweeted recommendation by billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

WhatsApp has sought to reassure worried users, even running full-page newspaper adverts in India, proclaiming that “respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA”.

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US senator to investigate if foreign spyware used to target Americans

News Agency nabakhabar — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 10:56:22 +0000

An influential US senator has told the Guardian he is examining the possible hacking of US citizens with technology sold by the NSO Group and other foreign surveillance companies, an issue he said raised “serious national security issues”.

Ron Wyden’s remarks come just weeks after a lawsuit was filed by WhatsApp against NSO, alleging that the Israeli company’s malware was used against 1,400 WhatsApp users in 20 countries over a 14-day period this year.

The lawsuit says that more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and academics were among those targeted, and that at least one US phone number with a Washington DC area code was among those potentially compromised.

In a rare move for a major US company, WhatsApp has also twice referred its complaints about NSO to the US Department of Justice. The Facebook-owned company alerted the DoJ in May, when it first became aware of the issue, and again in October.

WhatsApp said it believed NSO had violated criminal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal law that is used to prosecute hackers.

The justice department declined to comment.

NSO has said it would defend itself against the lawsuit, insisting it sells its signature spyware, known as Pegasus, to foreign governments solely for the purpose of fighting crime and preventing terrorist attacks.

“We’re proud that our technology helps governments save lives and address the challenges posed by criminals and terrorists using encrypted messaging technology,” a spokesperson said.

“NSO software is specifically designed to not function on US phone numbers and cannot be used on phones with US area codes,” the spokesperson added.

The company has come under mounting scrutiny because of allegations that it has sold its product to authoritarian regimes, including Saudi Arabia, and other governments with poor human rights records, which, activists allege, have used it to target members of civil society.

Wyden, who is the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate finance committee, declined to comment on the WhatsApp suit. He expressed concern about “mercenary contractors” and “foreign hackers” in the cyber surveillance industry who could be targeting Americans.

“Congress has a clear role in ensuring that Americans are not helping authoritarian governments to hack or engage in other similar conduct that raise human rights concerns,” the Oregon senator and privacy advocate said.

He also said he asked the US Commerce Department to provide his office with an update on the implementation of regulations that would prevent US nationals from providing services to “foreign military intelligence services” without first obtaining a US licence.

“If foreign surveillance companies like NSO are helping their foreign government customers hack or spy on Americans, particularly US government employees and contractors, that would raise serious national security issues,” Wyden said. “I am looking into this topic, and expect to have more to say in the coming weeks.”

His remarks come as David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said governments needed to do a better job of controlling the export of spyware.

NSO was just one participant in a global industry that seemed to him to be “out of control, unaccountable and without constraint”, Kaye said. “The companies involved in such activity – and their defenders – will say this is a price to pay to confront terrorism.”

Neither companies, nor governments, were doing enough to try to tackle the issue, Kaye said. “In fact, governments have been happy to have these companies help them carry out this dirty work.

“This isn’t a question of governments using tools for lawful purposes and incidentally, or inadvertently, sweeping up some illegitimate targets: this is using spyware technology to target vulnerable yet vital people that healthy democracies need to protect.”

Kaye has called for an immediate moratorium on the transfer of spyware until viable international controls are placed on them.

NSO defended its record, saying: “NSO’s technology is only licensed after a thorough vetting process that goes well beyond the legal requirements that we follow. All potential customers must meet strict export authority regulations before any sale, in addition to NSO’s internal vetting process that includes a focus on human rights.”

The company introduced a new human rights policy this year which it said would help stem potential abuse. NSO said it would take all reasonable steps to prevent and mitigate the risk of misuse of its products and promised to pay “specific attention” to protect individuals or groups at elevated risk of “arbitrary digital surveillance and communication interception”.

But Kaye, and other human rights defenders, have questioned whether it goes far enough.

NSO is facing multiple lawsuits in different countries. The WhatsApp claim is the most recent and alleges the most widespread abuse.

In the weeks since the lawsuit was filed in a California court, more than a dozen alleged hacking victims, including activists and reporters from India, Rwanda, and Morocco, have come forward to allege that they received notice from WhatsApp that their accounts were breached.

They include Aboubakr Jamaï, a campaigner and former journalist who lives in France and won the prestigious International Press Freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2003.

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WhatsApp ‘hack’ is serious rights violation, say alleged victims

News Agency nabakhabar — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 07:15:33 +0000

More than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.

The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company.

WhatsApp launched an unprecedented lawsuit against the surveillance company earlier this week, claiming it had discovered more than 1,400 of its users were targeted by NSO technology in a two-week period in May.

Filed in a Californian court, the lawsuit described the alleged attacks as an “unmistakeable pattern of abuse” that violated US law.

Two pro-democracy campaigners from Morocco who received the WhatsApp warnings said any use of the sophisticated malware, known as Pegasus, against them would be a serious violation of their rights.

“I am a big proponent of democratisation in the Middle East in general and in Morocco in particular,” said Aboubakr Jamaï, a campaigner and former journalist who lives in France. “The Moroccan regime is certainly less nefarious than, say, the Syrian regime, but it’s nonetheless an authoritarian regime who can use some despicable means against its opponents, as it did.”

Jamaï, who has gained international recognition for his groundbreaking work as a publisher who faced jail for his journalism, said he was contemplating his own separate legal action against NSO, and would consider a possible class-action suit with other alleged victims.

Abdellatif El Hamamouchi, a 22-year-old human rights activist in Rabat who has been campaigning for justice for the jailed newspaper editor Taoufik Bouachrine, also received the alert.

Hamamouchi said: “I already strongly believed that I was under surveillance from the Moroccan authorities, but it surprised me that these attacks were coming from abroad, and they involved an Israeli company. The action taken by WhatsApp against NSO is a positive thing.

“I have not heard from NSO since I was informed about this, but I would regard any explanation they could give as worthless.”

At least six Rwandan dissidents have also come forward with claims they were targeted by Pegasus, according to interviews with the Financial Times.

Among them was Faustin Rukundo, a British citizen who is a member of a Rwandan opposition group and lives in exile and in fear of Rwanda’s security services.

In India, 17 people, including human rights activists, scholars and journalists, are said to have confirmed to Scroll.in that they were targeted by spyware on WhatsApp.

NSO has said it will contest “in the strongest possible terms” the WhatsApp lawsuit, but declined to comment further. It has insisted it cannot comment on its customers, or the people who have received alerts from WhatsApp.

The company said it investigated all serious allegations against it and had recently adopted a new human rights policy.

“The sole purpose of NSO is to provide technology to licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime. Our technology is not designed or licensed for use against human rights activists and journalists. It has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years,” the company said.

“We consider any other use of our products than to prevent serious crime and terrorism a misuse, which is contractually prohibited. We take action if we detect any misuse.”

However, NSO has faced a chorus of criticism because of the alleged abuse of its technology. It is widely reported to have sold its spyware to authoritarian regimes including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The WhatsApp lawsuit also claims human rights activists and lawyers were not the only intended victims of the cyber-attacks, with unnamed diplomats and senior government officials also targeted.

Although WhatsApp declined to provide more details about the claims, Reuters reported on Thursday that the targeted officials were from “multiple” US-allied countries.

Pressure on NSO grew on Friday when the Israeli security cabinet minister, Ze’ev Elkin, insisted the government had nothing to do with the company.

In an interview on Tel Aviv radio, he described NSO “as a private player” and said if anyone had done anything wrong, “then the justice system here and in other countries will throw the book at them”.

The Indian government has called on WhatsApp to submit a detailed report by next week on claims that many Indians were targeted.

Some NSO employees complained on social media after Facebook – which owns WhatsApp – appeared to have shut down accounts of employees at the cyberweapons company. One referred to Facebook as “the world’s greatest privacy violator”.

“Facebook, you never cease to amaze me,” wrote one executive in a publicly available post on LinkedIn, which was liked by several other NSO employees.

“Yesterday, both of my personal Facebook and Instagram profiles were intentionally disabled by the world’s greatest privacy violator in the history of mankind, aka Facebook.”

NSO declined to comment on the remarks.

Facebook also declined to comment, but pointed to the WhatsApp lawsuit, which urged the court to order “a permanent injunction enjoining and restraining (NSO) and their agents, servants, employees from accessing or attempting to access WhatsApp’s and Facebook’s service, platform and computer systems.”

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WhatsApp restricts message-sharing to fight fake news

News Agency nabakhabar — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 16:07:39 +0000

The Facebook-owned business had already introduced the policy in India six months ago.

The move followed a number of mob lynchings that were blamed on fake reports spread via the service.

Until now, users elsewhere could forward messages up to 20 times.

The update to the app’s rules was announced at an event in Jakarta, Indonesia. The country is holding its general election in April.

The firm told the BBC it had made its decision after “carefully” evaluating the results of its half-year-long test in the country.

“The forward limit significantly reduced forwarded messages around the world,” a spokeswoman added.

“[This] will help keep WhatsApp focused on private messaging with close contacts. We’ll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content.”

Scrambled messages

Up to 256 users can be enrolled in a WhatsApp group.

So, theoretically, a single user can now only forward a message up to 1,280 other individuals rather than the 5,120 people figure that had been possible previously.

There is nothing, however, to stop those on the receiving end each forwarding the message up to five times themselves.

The restriction comes at a time WhatsApp and Facebook’s other services are under scrutiny for their role in the spread of propaganda and other untruths online.

Last week, Facebook announced it had removed 500 pages and accounts allegedly involved in peddling fake news in Central Europe, Ukraine and other Eastern European nations.

It also recently announced that it had employed a UK-fact-checking service to flag content on its main platform.

However, the use of end-to-end encryption by WhatsApp means its messages can only be read by their senders and recipients, limiting the firm’s ability to spot false reports.

But at the end of last year, the Indian press reported that the government was considering a change to the law that would force Facebook to police WhatsApp for “unlawful” content. This would challenge its use of the encryption technology

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