Ed Ludlow

And you can check out the full Bloomberg Newsmakers interview on Bloomberg.com or on YouTube.

Now, coming up, U.S.

law enforcement has been investigating allegations that Meta staff can access WhatsApp messages.

More on that next.

This is Bloomberg Tech.

U.S.

law enforcement has been investigating allegations that Meta staff can access WhatsApp messages.

It's according to interviews and an agent's report.

Those claims, made by former contractors, run counter to the company's statements that the chat service is private and it's encrypted.

Now, a Meta spokesperson called those claims, quote, impossible.

Let's bring in Bloomberg's Jake Breiberg, who's been reporting this story.

So where do these impossible claims exactly come from and the data that would show people are reading them at Meta?

Thank you for having me.

The claims come from people who did contract work for Meta and were employed by the big management consulting firm, Accenture.

And what these people did was what Meta calls content moderation work.

there's a problem with communications over whatsapp or messenger or another platform that gets flagged to these folks and two of these people told these you know really explosive claims to law enforcement they claimed that they and meta staff had unfettered access to the content of what are supposed to be or what meta says are encrypted messages

Jake, this issue, reading that your reporting has come up before in 2024, a whistleblower, these are essentially whistleblowers, right?

But a whistleblower went to the SEC with very similar information.

Just explain that part, please.

Yeah, that's exactly right.