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A Brazilian judge ordered Facebook ( FB )’s vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, out of jail on Wednesday, one day after Dzodan had been arrested in Sao Paulo for refusing to hand over WhatsApp messages related to an organized-crime and drug-trafficking investigation. Judge Ruy Pinheiro considered Dzodan’s arrest “unlawful coercion,” the court said in a statement, according to a report by Agence France-Presse . “It seems to me that the extreme measure of imprisonment was hurried,” Pinheiro said, according to AFP. The judge’s order comes a day after executives from tech giant Apple ( AAPL ) and officials from the FBI faced off before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee as part of a showdown over whether Apple must develop a way to unlock the iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple has said that it won’t comply, seeking to safeguard product users’ privacy. Facebook, the owner of the popular WhatsApp mobile phone messaging tool, denies obstructing the police probe and criticized Brazil’s approach. “We are disappointed with the extreme and disproportionate measure of having a Facebook executive escorted to a police station in connection with a case involving WhatsApp, which operates separately from Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement. “Facebook has always been and will be available to address any questions Brazilian authorities may have.” WhatsApp has said that it had no technical means for cooperating , since it doesn’t store its users’ messages after they’ve been delivered, and has also been rolling out end-to-end encryption to keep others from being able to intercept or compromise those messages, according to a Wall Street Journal report. WhatsApp is popular in Brazil, where half of the country’s 204 million residents rely on the free text- and voice-messaging service. Many 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. In December, a different judge ordered the shutdown of WhatsApp throughout the entire country for 48 hours after the service failed to comply with a criminal investigation. The ruling affected millions of users before it was overturned the next day. Facebook stock was down a fraction in afternoon trading in the stock market today , near 109. Apple stock also was down a fraction, near 100, after rising 4% Tuesday. Scalper1 News
Scalper1 News