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| Facebook tries to parse encrypted data without decrypting it |
Facebook researchers hope to unite two enemies: encryption and advertising. The company plans to analyze the content of the encrypted data without decryption.
According to The Information, the company is hiring AI researchers to study the problem.
Your research can pave the way for the company to target ads based on encrypted WhatsApp messages. The social media giant can also use the results to encrypt the data it collects from billions of users without compromising its ad targeting capabilities.
This area of research is known as symmetric cryptography and is largely based on mathematics. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are also investigating this approach.
Symmetric encryption is designed to enable organizations to analyze personal data, including medical records and financial data, while maintaining information encryption and protecting against cybersecurity threats.
Facebook said it's too early to consider using symmetric encryption for WhatsApp at this point.
Companies can benefit from technology in many ways. Protecting data without compromising the effectiveness of ad targeting can help companies achieve their business goals and address regulatory concerns about the way they handle user information.
However, it may take years for the company to take advantage of symmetric encryption.
In 2019, Facebook announced its intention to offer end-to-end encryption across all messaging services. WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
Later that year, the United States, Britain and Australia sent a joint letter to the company.
The letter urged the company not to proceed with the project without ensuring that the safety of its users would not deteriorate. Court-authorized law enforcement agencies are not allowed to access the content of communications to protect the public, especially child users.
Facebook wants to combine encryption and advertising
In any case, encryption is a sensitive issue for Facebook, regardless of whether it can analyze the data or not.
The company has published several positions in this regard on its website, stressing that it hopes to improve the efficiency of its market-leading advertising system while working on data protection technology.
For Facebook, symmetric encryption can provide a way to continue enjoying targeted advertising based on the understanding of individual users, and can also respond to legislative demands to take data protection more seriously and prevent data loss.
It can help businesses make money on WhatsApp. WhatsApp messages are encrypted, which means that Facebook cannot use them for targeted advertising.
Shortly after Apple introduced the app tracking transparency feature, Facebook ramped up its research into new ways to target ads to users through WhatsApp messages.
The social media giant criticized the feature heavily in the weeks leading up to its official launch.