The future of digital communication and privacy Will Cathcart

it’s a treat to have with us the head of

whatsapp will Cathcart hi Chris thank

you so much for having me and for giving

me the chance to have this conversation

you know I’m struck by the fact that

this conversation had to be digital

you know we because of coronavirus

haven’t been able to get together face

to face for Ted or really almost

anything else and in fact you and I have

had a number of conversations in the

lead-up to today and they’ve all had to

be digital we’ve never actually met face

to face even though it feels like we

have and we at whatsapp you know work on

a product and a technology to try to

help people have face to face

conversations when they can’t be face to

face and we’ve seen in the last few

months that be more necessary than ever

and people turn to whatsapp even more

than they had before as you mentioned in

places like Afghanistan and all around

the world to be able to talk to connect

with a loved one or do even more as you

mentioned you know more sensitive things

for governments to conduct work or

discussions with the people in the

country for businesses to get work done

for doctors to connect with patients

we’ve seen doctors for example in

northern Italy use whatsapp as a way to

connect with patients and they couldn’t

be physically together and you you put

it perfectly we believe this works

because people trust what’s up they

trust that they can have a deeply

sensitive private conversation when they

can’t be sitting face-to-face with the

same level of security and privacy they

would have had in the real world’s

digitally on what’s up and the reason

why as you mentioned is a technology we

use called end to end encryption which

many of you watching the talk will be

familiar with but for those who aren’t

and an encryption is a it’s a pretty

special technology because what

let’s you do is send a message to

someone or make a call to someone and

know that they’re the only one who will

get it so for example Chris you could

send a message to your doctor and know

that as soon as it leaves your phone

it’s scrambled no-one can see it along

the way

not even what’s that until it reaches

your doctor and then they can see it and

there have been a number of questions

and discussions around this recently as

you mentioned even in fact in liberal

democracies there’s increasingly been a

question as to whether that kind of

technology should be something you as a

person have access to to use or whether

we need to change to a model where if

you’re calling someone messaging someone

video chatting with someone there has to

be a central repository of that some

company your government have a way to go

access what you’re saying we think this

is a pretty serious choice with

meaningful consequences for people as we

build back you know kovat accelerated a

trend where we were increasingly

communicating digitally instead of face

to face already and now as we enter a

world where at times we’re gonna have to

communicate digitally and even when we

don’t have to increasingly we will to

not have the ability to do that securely

knowing that no one can listen to your

conversation we think would be a huge

issue

you’d have to worry about hackers and

criminals accessing your conversations

or even governments and foreign

governments eavesdropping on what you’re

doing and more broadly if we want to

live in a world where governments can

use it to communicate doctors can talk

to patients educators can talk to

students and you can talk to the people

closest in your life about the most

sensitive things we think we need to

have end-to-end encryption and products

like whatsapp that are secure so you

know those conversations are safe well

the the scale of whatsapp is astonishing

I think you have like 2 billion active

users and there’s a hundred billion

messages per day a hundred billion

messages per day I can’t get my head

around it give us give us a story

of how encrypted communication has

really led to something positive so that

we can just get the feel of it in action

yeah I mean you know a great example of

this is the ability for a government to

communicate what you can’t be together

so we you know we saw stories with

coronavirus of the British military

reaching out to members of the military

with orders and instructions on where

they need it to be over what’s that of

course we hear about that in the news

because we have no way of knowing we

have no way of seeing and more broadly

you know obviously not everyone’s a

government official or working in

government but if you think about your

life and what you do in a typical day

and a lot of the countries where

whatsapp is popular people use it not

just to talk to their loved ones but to

conduct business you use it to

communicate with shopkeepers small

businesses in particular to order food

to order clothes to book services and

knowing that you can do that and share

all the information you share as part of

a you know economic transaction actually

I think is enabled because you know that

it’s secure you know that no one’s

looking at what you’re saying

I mean delivering trustable privacy to

people is clearly an important good some

people worry about that you know that

carries with it an inherent is it an

inherent danger that people can use that

security to for example share dangerous

messages or or even transmit truly

obnoxious material like in its most

extreme like child pornography how it’s

not just a trade off that society has to

make it’s one things versus yeah they

can you can you adjust the balance so

that you can kind of minimize the risks

while still giving the security yeah we

believe that you you can give security

and take steps to combat bad abuse we do

that every day in fact we lead the

industry on foreign encrypted messaging

service being able to find and detect

abuse in general and as you mentioned

people sharing inappropriate illegal

imagery about children we find into text

thousands

of accounts and and report them each

month based on things like someone in

the conversation seeing something and

feeling uncomfortable and choosing to

report it to us at which point we can

see or patterns of behavior but what we

we don’t have is every message sent by

over 2 billion people and we believe

that fundamentally the security

trade-off the the cost to your safety

for us to start collecting every one of

those messages would be disastrous and

you don’t want us to and this feels new

and unfamiliar because it’s new to us as

a society to have digital conversations

but it’s not new to us as a society to

have conversations we’ve done it for

thousands of years with an expectation

that when you say something to someone

else Chris as soon as the words leave

your mouth they’re gone and we’ve chosen

even though we could as a society not to

do all sorts of things you could do to

fight crime you know we at this point

could build a camera and a microphone

and install it in every living room in

the United States hooked up to a central

server for the government to access it

but I think naturally we would recoil in

horror at the consequences of doing

something like that even if there would

be some cases where it would help solve

crimes and our view is that if we’re

gonna be forced to have conversations

digitally because we can’t be sitting

face-to-face we shouldn’t have to give

up the security and privacy we’ve had

for hundreds of years in that transition

my last question before community

questions coronavirus suddenly

everyone’s in lockdown it’s made a huge

difference to your business give us give

us some numbers and descriptions of how

it’s changed behavior yeah I mean for us

what we’ve seen is more people sending

messages you mentioned over a hundred

billion messages a day in April in

particular we’ve seen a lot of people

doing video calls to connect with people

especially group video calls we actually

expanded the limit so you can call it to

eight people now and what’s that and

we’ve seen a lot of governments and

health agencies use it to get

information out to people so help lines

in over 70 countries and agencies we can

get information but the you know the

stories that stick with us the most are

where people are doing things

that they just couldn’t do before you

know for me the idea that doctors are

using it to communicate with patients is

fantastic and the idea that you don’t

have to go into a doctor’s office or a

hospital to get help is unbelievable the

idea that governments are using it we’ve

heard stories of governments in both

India and Brazil where whatsup is

possible where court systems using

whatsapp to communicate about cases

because you don’t want to bring everyone

into a courtroom mmm all right take

community your questions

hmm how do you balance privacy and the

risk in the spread of misinformation

this is a great question we think about

this a lot and the way we’ve dealt with

misinformation is predominantly by

changing the product to recognize the

fact that it is private and it is secure

and so it shouldn’t be a place where you

can broadcast information so for example

a little over a year ago we changed

whatsapp so that you can’t forward a

message to more than five people at once

if you see something you can’t spread it

along actually in the last few months

just as coronavirus was expanding around

the world we launched a feature where

now if a specific message has been

forwarded many times you can only

forward it to one person at a time and

there’s no quick forward button we’ve

also partnered with journalism

fact-checking organizations so that

people who want to in whatsapp when they

see a message can send it off to a

journalist for fact-checking which helps

them find out whether it’s true or not

obviously not everyone’s going to use it

but what we’re really excited about is

it means that even though we can’t see

what messages are going around

journalists can they can get a sample of

what types of people saying in their

country and use that to correct

misinformation in mass media mmm it’s

interesting you can’t see the

information itself but you can see what

misinformation might look black at a

meta level and then maybe do something

go out and with it with a message to

everyone in the country about you know

here’s the facts about coronavirus mmm

my next question assuming we have one

so this is from Jacqueline Ashby what’s

the current status and involvement of

what’s up in F in Facebook’s

cryptocurrency Libre Project yeah

I can’t speak to all the work liebherr

and the libra team are doing but I know

they’re having a number of conversations

with regulators about how do you build a

cryptocurrency product in a way that’s

safe and secure and resistant to all the

types of harm’s you might see in other

cryptocurrency projects we’re excited

about it on what’s that because of the

economic opportunity you know we have a

lot of people who use whatsapp who are

international immigrants and working in

a country far from their home who want

to send money back to the people that

they care about at home and today that’s

so expensive and just as what’s that

maid calling your family when you’re

overseas free we would love to make it

much much cheaper for you to send money

home in the context this question is

Facebook obviously owns whatsapp how is

that relationship by the way well do you

feel is that a healthy relationship are

you allowed to do your work without

having to constantly somehow lean

towards Facebook’s bottom line in some

way yeah great question I think it’s

been a fantastic relationship because

since whatsapp joined Facebook over five

years ago Facebook has been able to

invest in bringing to whatsapp to

everyone around the world for free you

know it’s easy for especially those over

the United States us to forget this but

calling and texting people used to be at

ferociously expensive all around the

world even in the u.s. it cost but in a

lot of developing countries around the

world you would be talking tens of cents

or more for every single text you sent

you know large amounts of money for a 10

20 minute phone call what’s that made

that all free and by becoming part of

Facebook Facebook was able to take away

actually what’s up used to charge users

a dollar to use the service Facebook

took that away invested in expanding it

and invested in the infrastructure so we

could offer not just texting but things

like voice and video calling for free

worldwide so this is possibly really

puzzling to people it certainly was to

me you told me that even like five years

after Facebook of quiet you you still

don’t actually make money how can that

be

yeah we we don’t we don’t generate a ton

of revenue we aspire to it’s not that we

don’t think there’s interesting business

opportunities with what’s up we think

there are but we think connecting

everyone so they can have free

communication is step one and step two

is connecting people with businesses and

we’re already starting to see in a lot

of the countries where whatsapp is

popular people communicate with

businesses for free to find out about

products buy things book services we

have millions and millions of businesses

using for example our what’s that

business app and we believe that down

the line there’ll be obviously great

opportunities we can we can add for

those businesses that will generate

revenue for example we hear from tons of

businesses that they want to reach more

customers we can help businesses that

have never advertised before advertised

on Instagram or Facebook for the first

time and find more customers should be

great for economic activity but the

focus for us has been how do you reach

people all around the world how do you

get them connected how do you get the

businesses connected and down the line

the opportunities will come we’ll take

two more community questions what do you

think will be the transformational and

longer-term impact 1119 on technology

use in our daily lives are we all

getting confused between the real world

and the virtual world now is this is

this gonna take over and be our lives in

the future so it’s a great question Anna

yeah that’s a great question Anna I mean

I think to some extent we’re gonna find

that things we thought you had to do

face to face you can do digitally and we

will adapt to think of those as similar

to what we did face to face even if that

sounds hard to believe you know I my

wife and I have a daughter she’s almost

2 years old and we had this funny

realization after we was born that we

didn’t agree on how to pronounce her

name

I say Naomi and my wife says Naomi and

as parents that’s like the worst thing

you can do is disagree on how to

pronounce your daughter’s name and it

took us a couple months to figure out

how that happened before we realized the

answer was that every conversation we’d

had about naming our daughter had been

typed it hadn’t actually been in person

face to face but we didn’t know that as

people we just

think of those conversations the same

and so I think part of the

transformation from Cova 19 is we’re

gonna we’re gonna communicate remotely

we’re gonna work remotely they’re gonna

do a lot more of this digitally and to

them it won’t feel any different or as

different as you might think as when

they were sitting next to each other

nice question

I know we have another one well while

we’re waiting for that I’m gonna ask you

this just just you know the hearing

President Ghani talked about the power

of these face-to-face conversations

humans to humans in a circle is there a

fundamental difference between the way

that humans communicate when they’re

texting each other versus when they’re

speaking and do you think like is there

a correction on us that could happen in

the world now is companies like yours

and others start building more video

communication as opposed to just text

text text that it might change this

cycle of outrage if you like that

text-based social media seems to have

driven yeah great question I mean for us

look we I personally you know my

preference would have been to have this

conversation in person you know my

preference would have been for us to be

all together in Vancouver to talk cuz I

do think there are parts of the

face-to-face conversation that

technology doesn’t just capture I think

the challenge for us is people who build

technological products is how do we get

closer to that how do we make it so that

if you’re having a conversation with

someone you have to be separated by

thousands of miles or you have to be

separated by six feet how do we make it

so that it feels as close to

face-to-face video helps with that you

know even are there improvements you can

make to that to make it feel more

emotive other improvements you can make

to it so it’s really truly as secure and

private as you would have had with a

face-to-face conversation you know are

there ways you can make it so that if i

text you something it doesn’t feel like

that’s gonna hang around forever I think

that’s the challenge for us and part of

why we believe with whatsapp it’s so

important that we match the security and

privacy you have in-person digitally and

not say hey this digital world is

totally different

we should change all the ways human

beings communicate and completely upend

the rules no we should try to match that

as best we can because there’s something

magical about people talking to each

other privately hmm well well I think

we’re out of time thank you for I mean

it really is an amazing company thank

you for many lovely pictures and videos

I get pretty much every day for my

grandkids couldn’t happen without what’s

happened quite the same way I think and

you know you’re at the middle of an

incredibly important debate about how

humans use these tools to build the

future so thank you for sharing if

someone wants to reach out to what’s up

and they have a suggestion or a question

how how can they best reach out to you

then come up come on our website what’s

up comm and options for how you can

reach out and or you know you know find

us on twitter at whatsapp and let us

know what you think thank you so much

Chris for the chance to talk we think

this is a really known issue and one we

hope others are paying attention to all

right thank you

well best we’ll take care thank you