Sarmed Malik
Whatsapp, a Facebook-owned company is in the middle of a lawsuit against an Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group.
But before complaining about how the firm operates, Facebook tried to purchase the software for its own purposes, Tech Crunch reports.
This comes at a shock as last year’s news of an exploits to install NSO software known as Pegasus on devices using WhatsApp. The latter sued the former over it, saying that more than 5000 human rights accounts were compromised that also included journalists.
In 2017, Facebook sought NSO group services in collecting data on the IOS device which are resistant to the usual tricks, unlike Andriod which at its core is open source and anyone can attach spyware without the user’s consent. NSO Group declined for comment as it cites that it only provides software to government agencies for law enforcement.
The shock is, Facebook wanting to employ software to spy users and then later decry being deployed against its users. Facebook proposed to pay NSO monthly fee if it was able to lift private information of IOS users through their Onavo Protect VPN which Facebook purchased in 2013.
WhatsApp in its core form does have some independence with encrypted messages but these came well after it was integrated with Facebook.
For this reason, we need oversight to make sure companies or even corporations do go beyond their intended parameters
NSO group who utilize secret intrusion methods to spy on official and use that information to be sold. And on top of that Facebook is in the same pool as of them making Facebook the world`s most notorious collector and peddler of private information.
At this moment, nobody knows how many people account have been compromised but we know for sure, that they are compromised.
