A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it?

Lavender is Israel’s system of “pre-crime” [3] – they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they’re at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program “Where’s Daddy”).

One input to the AI is whether you’re in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There’s a lot wrong with this – I’m in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect.

But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a “private” social network, including “end-to-end” encryption of messages……more