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It’s … Indicators of the Week! Our weekly look at some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news.  On today’s episode: the effects of pay transparency, Meta’s big win, and freaky flies and beef.  Related episodes:  Are we entering a new dawn for antitrust enforcement?  Why beef prices are so high  For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org . Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez . Music by Drop Electric . Find us: TikTok , Instagram , Facebook , Newsletter .  

The Indicator from Planet Money It’s … Indicators of the Week! Our weekly look at some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news.  Packages of ground beef are seen at a supermarket in Houston, Texas. Image: RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images Pay transparency. The WhatsApp and Instagram decision. Our beef with screwworms. NCPR is supported by: More from NPR Brain scientists are seeking weight-loss drugs without the nausea Weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound often cause nausea and other side effects. Brain scientists are looking for ways to solve this problem. This weekend, artists are speaking out across the country Artists in more than 40 states are spending Friday and Saturday participating in the "Fall of Freedom" – which they say represents a creative resistance to authoritarianism. Russian hacking suspect wanted by the FBI arrested on Thai resort island Thai Police have arrested a suspected Russian hacker who is wanted by the FBI for alleged cyberattacks on U.S. and European government agencies. What former ally did Trump call a 'ranting Lunatic' this week? Find out in the quiz This week, the quiz examines truth, drugs and scandal! Rare earths: Federal backing and tech advances aim to help the U.S. catch

Researchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research identified a privacy vulnerability in WhatsApp’s contact discovery mechanism that enabled enumeration of more than 3.5 billion active accounts worldwide. Meta addressed the weakness following responsible disclosure. The findings were published in a preprint and will be presented at the NDSS Symposium in 2026. “Normally, a system should not respond to such a high number of requests in such a short time, particularly when originating from a single source,” says Gabriel Gegenhuber, Researcher, University of Vienna. “This behavior exposed the underlying flaw, which allowed us to issue an effectively unlimited number of requests to the server and, in doing so, map user data worldwide.” The discovery originated from an ongoing research effort by the University of Vienna and SBA Research to analyze how design choices in end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms can expose user metadata. WhatsApp uses a contact discovery process that matches the phone numbers in a user’s address book with its database. The same mechanism, when queried at scale, enabled the confirmation of more than 3.5 billion active accounts across 124 countries. This investigation builds on previous studies from the same institutions. These projects examined privacy risks related to silent

Even before the launch of the iPhone XS in 2018, many smartphones had dual-SIM support because many people have more than one phone number. However, having multiple WhatsApp accounts on the same device is still impossible, but it appears that’s about to change. WhatsApp is testing multiple accounts support WhatsApp is testing a new feature that allows users to use and manage multiple accounts on the same device. The feature was spotted by WABetaInfo in the latest TestFlight beta version of the app for iOS and is available to some beta users. Users can add a second account to WhatsApp through a new “Account List” section in the app’s settings. Currently, the beta supports up to two accounts, which can be newly created or existing accounts from WhatsApp Business or other devices. Once activated, the history, backup, and notification settings, and privacy preferences for each account remain separate. Switching between accounts can be done through the Account List section in the Settings or by double-tapping the Settings tab to switch to the next account. A press and hold on the Settings tab opens up a quick selection menu. If there’s more than one account activated in the app, notifications will

Hey, remember how I reported earlier in the month that WhatsApp will soon enable the use of usernames, instead of phone numbers, as the primary identifier in the app? Yeah, turns out there’s a security reason for that, with Austrian researchers finding that you can just enter every single possible phone number combination, through automated process, and find contact information, including name and profile images, for every WhatsApp user in existence. Which they claim is a significant security flaw, that WhatsApp’s parent company Meta has failed to address for years. As reported by Wired, a team of Austrian security researchers used this method to extract 3.5 billion users’ phone numbers from the platform. As per Wired: “For about 57% of those users, they also found that they could access their profile photos, and for another 29%, the text on their profiles. Despite a previous warning about WhatsApp's exposure of this data from a different researcher in 2017, they say, the service's parent company, Meta, still failed to limit the speed or number of contact discovery requests the researchers could make by interacting with WhatsApp's browser-based app, allowing them to check roughly a hundred million numbers an hour. ” Using this

Judge Sides With Meta In Antitrust Trial A federal judge ruled against the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust suit alleging that Meta had stifled competition by buying up its rivals. SCOTT DETROW, HOST: The tech company Meta won a victory in federal court today. A judge ruled it is not operating as an illegal monopoly. The decision means Meta will not be forced to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. The ruling comes after a seven-week trial back in April. NPR's Bobby Allyn covered that trial and joins us now to talk about what this all means for Meta and the tech industry as a whole. Hey, Bobby. BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Hey, Scott. DETROW: Let's start with the decision. What exactly did the judge rule? ALLYN: Yeah, at a high level, the federal judge, James Boasberg, said the Federal Trade Commission did not clear the high bar for establishing Meta as a monopoly. In order to show any given company is monopolizing a market, you have to define that market. And here, regulators argued Meta was abusing power in the personal social networking market, meaning chatting with friends and family on social media. But Boasberg said that definition had one big problem.

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A couple who were “unlawfully arrested” for criticising their daughter’s primary school on a

A police force has admitted the unlawful arrest of two parents who complained about their daughter’s primary school on WhatsApp. Maxie Allen, 50, and his partner Rosalind Levine, 47, say they were detained by six uniformed officers and held at a police station for 11 hours. Hertfordshire Police originally defended its decision to detain the couple but has now agreed a £20,000 payout, the Times reports. The force admitted a legal criteria for arrest was “not made out” and formally accepted liability for wrongful arrest and detention. Mr Allen, a Times Radio producer, said: “We’re very pleased Hertfordshire Constabulary have recognised, albeit belatedly, that our arrests were unlawful. “I hope the debate around our case has a positive effect on how these issues are handled in future. The police should not be a tool for public authorities to close down legitimate comment and scrutiny.” Mr Allen and Ms Levine had previously been banned from entering Cowley Hill Primary School, in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, after questioning the recruitment process for a head teacher and criticising the leadership in a parents’ WhatsApp group. The school said it had “sought advice from police” after a “high volume of direct correspondence and public social media

Parents arrested after complaining about school on WhatsApp get £20,000 payout