This has nothing to do with scaling. How do you picture that, some employee would broadcast sensitive information to a WhatsApp group, in order to reach as many others as possible at once?
The offense here is that no effort was done to keep records of the communication. It would have been ok to use WhatsApp if they somehow would have archived all communications.
Records of communications have to be kept so that auditors can verify that no inside trading secrets were communicated to others, for instance.
What matters is to they keep record of these whatsapp requests, not that they use whatsapp. If they screeshot all the chats one by one print them and airmail them to the SEC in postcard format, this is still ok. Saying "oh snap we dont know why we traded 5M of this just before a market moving event because we lost employee communication" is not ok.
Chances are, the people you're thinking of, the very top, may very well have proof in writing they require employees not to talk abt the business on whatsapp.
I work in the same kind of company and Im baffled, I wouldnt dare say the name of a client on whatsapp and sometimes the regulated chat system is so inconvenient I have to use some personal device but we usually do it to "ping" people so they then go to the recorded system.
And that they seem to have used it for decision taking, not just random discussion at the bar, means every low level employee who ever gave a formal report or raised a formal question without resending by email is wrong. Every.low.level.employee, yes.
Burn the top all you want, but at this point maybe the SEC should directly go to our companies fucking explain people that we must record all steps in decision making, not just for discovering fraud but to protect ourselves and our clients from suspicion in the first place.
Shocked that it happened at JPM. The SEC is also wrong to say: "Indeed, supervisors, including managing directors and other senior supervisors – the very people responsible for implementing and ensuring compliance with JPMS’s policies and procedures "!!
No, EVEYONE is responsible, from the dimwit intern making coffee to the ferrari driving MD, record keeping is bank 101, this makes me boil for some reason. I d be such a pain in the ass of a big boss if I saw that where I work.
They're required to keep minutes from face to face meetings for compliance. Of course people still talk informally but they need to know to constraint what they talk about in those circumstances. This likely was triggered because some employees were using whatsapp to evade compliance checks on topics that should have been regulated.
Monitoring phone calls seems like a big leap from where the conversation was it.
I think most people would agree that if you keep things private that even a private entity shouldn't expose that. But if you broadcast the information publicly, then you are now liable to be held to a different standard.
So if a group started holding advertising public WhatsApp calls where they'd discuss plans to exterminate minority groups then I think WhatsApp would be OK in canceling their account (assuming its consistent with their TOS).
I don't think messaging apps should be able to collude though. This should be at a case by case, company by company basis.
WhatsApp is controlled by Facebook, and they already centralize a gigantic amount of personnal data. Their moral track record has also been consistently bad. They were part of the PRISM program. They meddle with politics. They are rich and powerful.
The chinese WeChat example shown us how convenient a popular chat app coupled with a payment system can be, and how quickly an entire society can adopt it.
I think this feature should be considered as a threat to users, and be avoided, while actively and strongly, but respectfully, advising people around us to do the same.
Frustrating to see people going to another centralized service. The issue with WhatsApp is not that they don't respect privacy. It's that they are structured in a way that they can make changes and no one can stop it.
At that point, I believe the strategy for Whatsapp was never to snoop into private conversations with other people, but to get all the transactions and interactions made with businesses.
If I had known for even a second that the reason whatsapp took so long to start up on my phone, was it uploading MY ENTIRE PHONEBOOK to their servers, I would never use it. The damage has been done, but I never will use it.
I don't understand how the whatsapp CEO can come out with a statement like this while presiding over a program that behaves like this.
Okay, fair enough. But presumably the WhatsApp groups are set up on an ad hoc basis by groups of staff - they're not being directed to use it by the HSE?
unknown. seems like they were being punished because their employees used whatsapp for business communication, not that it was discovered the employees used whatsapp and did something illegal
The problem here is that the third party controls the software on both ends of the communication. And that software can send the messages to this party without the participants knowingly triggering it.
The article says that by reporting a user, the software on the site of the reporting user silently sends data to WhatsApp. The reporting user does not know what data is sent.
No, they were fined because bankers must only communicate via channels that are monitored. By using whatsapp, they bypass all the internal and external audit/compliance teams.
The outrage is due to Facebook being involved. No one (very rightfully) trusts Facebook with their data. I doubt there would have been any outrage at this level if an independent WhatsApp was doing this.
It's hard, and it's an explicit tradeoff made when deciding to prioritize secure communication. One thing Facebook did with WhatsApp was limit group size and monitoring forwarding behavior (which can be done via metadata without needing to know the content), but it's an imperfect solution at best.
It stands to reason that for every WhatsApp conversation they'd have access to:
- who is communicating with whom,
- dates, times, and durations,
- method (text / voice / video),
- amount of data transferred,
- type of attachment if applicable, and
- location of each device,
along with unique device identifier, and perhaps other information.
See the Privacy International report[0] or video[1] on how much data FB glean from on other apps that merely use the Facebook SDK, each time an app that uses it it opened for a clue... how much more will they want from a service they paid billions for?
The offense here is that no effort was done to keep records of the communication. It would have been ok to use WhatsApp if they somehow would have archived all communications. Records of communications have to be kept so that auditors can verify that no inside trading secrets were communicated to others, for instance.
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