Can someone fill me in on why people are upset Facbook will be consolidating DMs/PMs accross services - using E2E?
I've went other the past news releases, it seems to be a good thing to me.
back
3 comments
"They will make money by tracking your relationships and social groups. They will make that information easily accessible to law enforcement.
They will build the largest surveillance system ever conceived and will sell it under the banner of consumer encryption."
But they're already doing that?
If I could snap my fingers and everyone would switch to Matrix [1] I would, but as it stands hundreds of millions of people use these services daily and getting them more privacy will be useful.
They probably can already do everything you say, eg: cross reference and internally "trade" (meta)data between facebook, instagram and whatsapp backends and deliver that to law enforcement. I'm pretty sure their ability to do analytics is advanced enough (though even technical people sometimes really overestimate how "good" those big companies are at it).
At least at that point they will not have the contents of your messages. Which now they do (with the exception of whatsapp).
Usual Facebook hatred on HN - move along, nothing to see.
I love to hate on Facebook to, but the point is that they get better - and this seems to be and excellent start!
But I've yet to find similar opinions in tech groups online or even less techy spaces.
Metadata + Countries where Rule Of Law doesn't apply + "Law" Enforcement requests
E.g. Middle East countries
Rule of law doesn't imply strong privacy. In fact, I'd argue that privacy and rule of law are fundamentally in tension. Privacy favors scofflaws, particularly those trying to corrupt the law, so in any social system with privacy there's going to be a tendency toward asymmetry of privacy in favor of the corrupt.
The ideal scenario for rule of law is no privacy. However, privacy has intrinsic value of its own so we're stuck trying to maximize privacy while minimizing the corruption. It's an ongoing balancing act; every society will do it differently and it will change over time.
If we can assume Facebook's apps aren't lying (i.e. E2E is properly implemented - this seems to be the case with WhatsApp) then this is better for those exact purposes.
Even the star child Signal [1] has to store metadata...
You get what E2E encryption is, right?
You get what metadata is, right?
That FB doesn't get to snoop what you're saying doesn't prevent them from knowing who you are saying it too. They still control the app.