Social media giant Facebook scans users’ privately shared links and media on its Messenger App, a report has found. Apart from this, its moderators also read flagged messages, to check if they comply with its rules. They are taken down if they don’t. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said while talking about ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, “In that case, our systems detect what’s going on.” “We stop those messages from going through,” he added. Mark told Klein that Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app. Further, the company also told Bloomberg that Messenger scans with the same tools that are used across its larger platform to prevent abuse and to ensure that content abides by "community standards". It said it scans media using photo matching technology to search for known child exploitation imagery and it scans links to check it for malware or viruses. Facebook maintained that they are not scanning messages for the purpose of targeted advertising or other purposes. Users reacted on Twitter In the process of taking my group chats off @facebook Messenger and over to @WhatsApp. The fact that they scan private messages is disturbing to say the least. — Rob Eno (@Robeno) April 5, 2018 Facebook also owns messenger service WhatsApp, which has end-to-end encryption, so only the sender and receiver/s can read what is shared. Messenger also has an option to encrypt messages ut it is not the default mode, instead it has to be turned…
