A displaced Palestinian man uses an eSIM card to speak to relatives on a hill in Rafah, in southern Gaza.The group, which is affiliated with the Al Jazeera Media Institute and Access Now, accused Meta, which owns WhatsApp, of fueling “the ‘Lavender’ artificial intelligence system used by the Israeli military to kill Palestinian individuals within thethat a current commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit pushed for the use of AI to choose targets in Gaza.
“Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app,” he wrote. “It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel’s killings of ‘pre-crime’ targets and their families, in violation of international humanitarian law and Meta’s publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in ‘pre-crime.
The question about Lavender using Whatsapp groups for their targeting, and Meta’s potential role in this is important, but it’s also very important to remember the number of methods Israel can use to gain access to that information without Meta.
last month that “WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government,” adding that “Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested.”