First Apple, Now Facebook Under Pressure To Turn Over User Data
Brazilian federal police arrested the head of Facebook ‘s ( FB ) Latin America operations early Tuesday for not complying with police requests to access WhatsApp messages linked to an organized-crime and drug-trafficking case, the Wall Street Journal reported. The arrest is expected to draw the attention of other U.S. tech companies watching the combat taking place between Apple ( AAPL ) and the U.S. government. The U.S. Justice Department recently requested that Apple unlock an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist involved in a mass shooting last year in San Bernardino, Calif. Apple has said that it won’t comply, seeking to safeguard product users’ privacy. In the WhatsApp case, Diego Dzodan was arrested on his way to work in São Paulo and is being held under “preventative arrest,” according to a police spokeswoman in the state of Sergipe, where a judge’s order was issued, the WSJ said. A Facebook spokesman said that the company is “disappointed with the extreme and disproportionate measure” of taking Dzodan into custody. The Facebook spokesman said that Dzodan was detained for questioning, not arrested. Facebook owns WhatsApp, but WhatsApp operates separately from Facebook. According to the court, Facebook was fined about $250,000 — more than BRL 1 million, the local currency — for not complying with three previous requests, said the WSJ. This is the second time in three months that Facebook has clashed with Brazilian authorities, the report said. In December, a different judge ordered the shutdown of WhatsApp throughout the entire country for 48 hours after the service didn’t comply with a criminal investigation. The ruling affected millions of users but was overturned the next day. WhatsApp is popular in Brazil, where half of the country’s 204 million residents rely on the free text- and voice-messaging service. Many poorer Brazilians depend on WhatsApp for their day-to-day communications, the WSJ said, since texting in Brazil is about 55 times more expensive than in the U.S., according to advisory firm Activate. WhatsApp says that it doesn’t store its users’ messages after they’ve been delivered and has also been rolling out end-to-end encryption so that it can’t intercept or compromise those messages, according to the WSJ. “This means police have arrested someone over data that doesn’t exist,” a WhatsApp spokesman said. “We cannot provide information we do not have.” Both the police and the court declined to provide additional information about the case. Facebook stock was up 2% in afternoon trading in the stock market today , near 71. Apple stock was up 3%, near 100. Apple executives and FBI officials are making their cases Tuesday at a House Judiciary Committee meeting.