Falcon powers – The Digital Violation Monitoring and Documentation Center “Sada Social” called for an urgent and immediate investigation into Meta’s leaking of WhatsApp user data to the Israeli military.
Our correspondent reported that the center is following “the objection of a number of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads) employees to the company’s involvement in the genocide in Gaza, its support for the Israeli occupation, and its feeding of the ‘Lavender’ system in artificial intelligence used by the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Lavender” is an artificial intelligence system used by the Israeli military to bombard and target Palestinians in Gaza with a lenient approach to targeting decision-making and execution, guessing who will be killed in Gaza, and then bombing them when they are at home with their entire families, according to the center.
The reports followed by “Sada Social” indicated that one of the inputs to the “Lavender” system “depends on data collected from WhatsApp groups and targeting Palestinians who may be present in the same group where Palestinian activists wanted by the occupation are also active.”
The center said, “The Israeli ‘Lavender’ system supported by artificial intelligence identifies the Palestinians targeted by the Israeli army in air strikes by tracking their communications through the WhatsApp app or the groups they join.”
This comes after the “Sada Social” expressed concerns on multiple occasions about Meta’s violation of privacy on WhatsApp, which the company knows as an “end-to-end encrypted” application, meaning that the owner company itself is unable to see user data and messages sent and received through the application.
Since October 7th and the start of the war in Gaza, the enforcement of censorship and violation of user privacy through WhatsApp has increased, with the blocking of more than 670 numbers of Palestinian users, more than 78% of whom are journalists and users in the Gaza Strip, directly affecting their lives, according to the center.
The center called on the Meta administration to commit to “responsibility and transparency on its various platforms, and to issue the transparency reports that it has been withholding since the start of the genocide war,” and called on the independent oversight board to enforce a prompt and genuine investigation into Meta’s leaking of Palestinian data and its involvement in the genocide.
