It was just a couple days ago that the story broke that Facebook had lied to Congress and was actually playing much looser with people’s data than originally expected. According to the New York Times…
“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
“The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.”
That was bad enough, that you and your children’s contacts were being revealed; but now it seems that their misdeeds have spread to WhatsApp. You’ll recall that Facebook purchased this social media conversation app in 2014.
Since then, WhatsApp has unfortunately been accused of allowing its users to promote child pornography. Despite being warned repeatedly about the practice, WhatsApp has either failed to stop the practice or has given up trying.
According to reporting by the Irish Times and the Financial Times, you can still download apps from Google that let you search group chat on WhatsApp and find those with “cp” in the name. In one recent case, there were more than 250 users actively discussing and trading content regarding child torture or pornography.
Even more distressing, the admins of WhatsApp designed the app with “end-to-end” encryption making it difficult if not impossible to trace individual accounts.
While WhatsApp may be less popular with youth than Snapchat, a common concern for both should be that your children realize there are some bad people pretending to be someone they aren’t.
It’s called PREVENTION people. Please make sure your children aren’t sending messages or photos to anyone you don’t already know and approve. Have that conversation today.
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