That relatable moment when you go on vacation to relax, but accidentally hack a Peruvian crime ring.
) is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project , a New York–based civil rights and privacy group, and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
The problems started with a jarring home screen. Instead of the fresh slate of a new account, I was met with a list of dozens of groups that I apparently was already a member of. Even with my embarrassingly poor Spanish, terms like “Dark Web” stood out, and the sexually suggestive emojis required no translation. Then I started getting messages. And while most of you will never find yourself embroiled in a Peruvian crime ring, your digital life faces the exact same vulnerabilities.
WhatsApp is encrypted, so people felt secure to speak candidly. And they began to speak a lot about drugs, sex work, and other terms I didn’t want to translate. People told me about upcoming deliveries, mentioning places I had never heard of. I was in heaven, sitting beside a rooftop pool overlooking the beaches and cliffs of Miraflores, and having a panic attack.
I started playing out scenes from cheesy mob movies, the naive bystander who’s killed because he saw too much. So I deleted everything. Every message, every group. I even went through mental exercises to blur my own memories, forcing myself to forget. But people continued to reach out. And when I continued to explain they had the wrong person, they were insistent: “Delete the number!”
And that’s how I ended up giving cybersecurity advice to a crime ring. I promised to delete the account, to switch the number, but then I explained how they were already compromised. Like so many WhatsApp accounts, my predecessor’s didn’t have, the opt-in security feature that can block exactly what I did by accident, taking over another person’s account, and in effect another person’s world.
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