#whistleblower

yahoo news | New Mexico jury says Meta harms children's mental health and safety, violating... A New Mexico jury found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act. After a nearly seven‑week trial, jurors concluded that Meta—owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp—prioritized profit over safety, made false or misleading statements, and engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that explo​ited the vulnerabilities of minors. The verdict counted thousands of individual violations, amounting to a $375 million penalty. Meta’s lawyers argued the company does disclose risks and works to remove harmful content, while acknowledging that some material slips through its safety net. The New Mexico case, filed by Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, relied on an undercover investigation in which agents posing as children documented sexual solicitations and Meta’s responses. The ruling adds to a wave of litigation—over 40 states have sued Meta for allegedly designing addictive features that fuel a mental‑health crisis among youth—while existing legal protections such as Section 230 and the First Amendment remain points of contention. The jury’s decision may lead to a second phase of the trial, potentially before a judge without a jury, to determine whether Meta created a public nuisance and to order remedial actions. Testimony during the trial highlighted internal Meta communications, whistleblower accounts, expert analyses, and the impact of platform algorithms that amplify sensational or harmful content. Prosecutors emphasized that Meta’s choices have profound negative effects on children, and the case signals increasing pressure on tech firms to take greater responsibility for the safety of young users. Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/mexico-jury-finds-meta-violated-211119198.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall #newmexico #meta #section230 #whistleblower

An Australian whistleblower facing death threats is in hiding after speaking out about intelligence failings prior to the 2025 Bondi massacre in Sydney. He infiltrated an ISIS-linked network & reported internally. That failed, so he went public. The Aus govt has a despicable pattern of persecuting & jailing bonafide whistleblowers. The Australian public broadcaster aired this doco about the issue: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2026/video/NC2603H002S00 #AusPol #USPol #EUPol #BondiMassacre #Whistleblower #News #Israel .

Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption A lawsuit filed in San Francisco alleges that #WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption contains backdoors allowing #Meta employees to access user messages in real-time. According to the complaint, internal tools allow engineers to view chats by User ID without a separate decryption step, bypassing the Signal Protocol protections the app claims to use. The lawsuit cites £whistleblowers who claim that workers can request access to specific accounts via internal tasks, gaining unlimited temporal scope to a user's history, including deleted messages. Meta has labeled these claims false and absurd. Technical experts note that while the Signal Protocol itself is mathematically secure, the integrity of end-to-end encryption relies entirely on the security of the endpoints. Potential vulnerabilities in WhatsApp include unencrypted cloud backups, metadata collection, and the fact that the client software is closed-source. Without the ability to audit the code or verify public keys through an independent directory, users must trust that the application is not exfiltrating plaintext data before it is encrypted for transit. The legal action highlights the ongoing tension between corporate privacy marketing and the technical reality of centralized messaging platforms. If the allegations of an internal "widget" for message access are proven true, it would represent a fundamental breach of the encryption standards Meta has advertised since 2016. https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/27/0550249/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has-no-end-to-end-encryption #WhatsApp #Meta #Privacy #CyberSecurity #Encryption #DataPrivacy #E2EE #TechNews #Lawsuit #Whistleblower #DigitalRights #Messaging #InformationSecurity #SignalProtocol