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Isn't this actually improving safety by openly admitting how things always were in practice?
Any e2e encryption provided by the same entity who fully controls both the blackbox clients, and the server in between, is just a security theatre that they can selectively bypass anytime with very little risk of detection. Not really much better than simple client to server encryption.
Truly safe e2e requires open source client provided by a trusted entity who is as much as possible independent from the one who provides the untrusted transport layer. Eg how pgp email works.
one thing to consider is how just the optics of major players using e2e was an overall benefit.
people who otherwise would have gone their entire lives without ever hearing about encryption were exposed to the term and the marketing convinced them that encryption and privacy was a valuable thing, even if they didnt fully understand the mechanisms or why e2e might not necessarily be very effective in specific circumstances.
later, when presented between option a and option b, where one has encryption and the other doesnt, they are more likely to choose the one with it ("well, if instagram and facebook use it and say it is good...")
This happened to my girlfriend and me twice on Messenger. On two consecutive nights, we heard a male voice with an American accent speaking as if he were talking to someone else, almost like they were conducting some kind of operation. It seemed as though he suddenly realized that we could hear him, after which the voice abruptly disappeared. The following night, it happened again, but this time the voice sounded like that of an African American woman. The situation was similar to the previous night. From that night, we have not used it to communicate and used Signal instead.
I don't disagree, but I think there is a distinction between "everything is e2ee, but specific conversations may be MiTM without detection" and "nothing is e2ee and can be retrospectively inspected at will" that goes a little beyond security theatre - makes it more analogous to old fashioned wiretaps in my mind.
Obviously it involves trust that it isn't actually "we say it's e2ee but actually we also MiTM every conversation"
E2E encryption lets Meta turn down government subpoenas because they can say they truly don't have access to the unencrypted data.
I can't say I really mind this change by Meta that much overall though. Anyone who's serious about privacy probably knew better than to pick "Instagram chat" as their secure channel. And on the other hand having the chats available helps protect minors.
One of the scary things is that not even this really works. Ignoring supply chain attacks, most people treat any client as effectively black box. When was the last time you read through the code of a messaging app? How do you know its safe? Maybe _you_ read through it, but 99% of people don't.
wouldn't signal fall under this category (same entity control the client and server in between) but they have no way of peaking inside any envelopes?
It's all about trust at the end of the day. And given that it was exposed that Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google etc all collaborated with the US government to provide surveillance (PRISM) by Edward Snowden, how we can trust them ever again?
>Any e2e encryption provided by the same entity who fully controls both the blackbox clients, and the server in between, is just a security theatre that they can selectively bypass anytime with very little risk of detection. Not really much better than simple client to server encryption.
You are no more capable of spotting a deliberately concealed backdoor in a binary than in source code, there's simply no meaningful difference.
the purpose of this move is to feed your private conversations to ai
Everyone is hypothesizing government backdoors and whatever else but to me there's a simpler and more obvious reason - AI.
Companies started pushing E2EE a few years ago because users' private messaging data used to be a liability. Now that the data can be fed into LLMs for training and inference its value has gone up significantly, and the privacy and security tradeoffs are suddenly worthwhile.
PMs across the industry are pushing product decks with "conversational AI assistants" to get their next promotion. I've been in more than one of these meetings myself. If the data is encrypted then there's no way to build this kind of stuff.
It's around the same time they announced their Applied AI org under Boz, which is responsible for data for Avocado/Mango/Watermelon training now. The timing certainly doesn't help.
So apparently this was opt-in, much like Telegram's OTR chat feature, and thus completely different than WhatsApp where it has always been default. Not a good look regardless, but the few who went into chat settings for a specific person to turn this on in the first place will likely just switch to WhatsApp or another app rather than continue without it.
It could be a move to have parity with TikTok, where they claim it’s for safety reasons. I’ve been seeing advertisements for Instagram touting their child/teen protection features. Seems like they’re really trying to beat the allegations that Instagram is bad for children’s health.
Protecting kids and Terrorism, always the reason why nobody is allowed to have privacy on the internet.
The sad part is, Instagram is exceptionally damaging to kids for a disjoint set of reasons.
It certainly is unsafe for their AI training corpus. Win / win if they can also lie about protecting children as a motivation.
It's bad for EVERYONE's health. Try to limit your usage and you'll feel better. I promise you'll feel better.
Protect your kids from whom? Surely not Meta, which is my main concern.
More like excuse
How these protections are working when I get served literal porn every couple of shorts on Instagram?
When Meta starting introducing E2E messaging it was a huge push. I wonder why they're doing away with it.
It was for plausible deniability because of regulatory scrutiny. Regulator's dead now, so now there's no downside and only upsides to spying on your users.
i am guessing that they just dont really need to pretend to care anymore. e2e messaging was a big marketing push, not ever an ideological thing. i assume they no longer believe the marketing benefits outweigh the downsides.
Because they realized they need the data for AI
PR. They wanted to seem like the good guys, but they get your messages through backdoors like the automatic backup.
Is this legitimate? It's so incoherent to see this blurb at the top saying it's being retired while everything underneath is pitching the value of e2e.
On the other hand Messenger has moved to only supporting e2ee chats, wonder why the difference.
I don't use IG although they dearly want me to, giving me a popup every time I visit, but let me talk about FB for a second (and btw FB wanted to enable cross-platform messaging on the platforms they own - Meta - which seems anti-trust-y) - when they introduced encryption on FB, they made it mandatory. They opted everyone in, and it broke Messenger. If you delete cookies you might also delete messages. Isn't that convenient?
There's a general trend right now against privacy and in a more general sense against freedom. More and more companies are on board with it. I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard. I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years. Does this particular measure matter very much? No, but it's another brick in the wall.
Socials are caught in the innovator's dilemma.
Given the dependence our society now has on the internet, it's bonkers to me that more VCs aren't rethinking their investment strategy. Privacy is not some niche concern anymore, check out the response to Flock for example.
The only reason I can think of for this change is governmental pressure. I don’t see how it benefits the platform itself (nor its users).
It feels like it's time to move to lemon writing over paper on normal post. Only way you can no talk freely.
just waiting on whatsapp to rug pull as well & then bye bye privacy & meta from my life
Just make it an OS feature.
There’s no need for the application to know the exact contents.
Other than search, but for most messaging and other apps the device can easily do indexing
Textbox with attribute ”encrypted”. Keys in the enclave/keychain.
This could obviously tie to sending you more ads.
It could also tag people communicating about topics ig chat that it is actively suppressing.
They may be looking for an uproar to reverse the policy as so far, it's just words.
the timeline for all of this is not a coincidence. meta spent millions lobbying for age verification laws that require content scanning. hard to scan content that's encrypted.
I wonder if this is the start of a trend or just a one-off?
This feature has never been available to me- it just threw an error each time. Wonder how far it actually got rolled out?
because they want to read your messages for training ai and for advertising
Never rely on a platform used by the masses to perform E2EE. It is far too easy to strip away E2EE for targeted users without their knowledge as they maintain the server and client code. This advise is to protect from corporations gobbling up and ultimately leaking sensitive data. Spooks can target the device itself via debug access for nation state level threats.
Consider instead using a code word or phrase to move sensitive conversations to something self hosted such as jabber using OMEMO XEP-0384 and XEP-0373 OpenPGP for XMPP and SASL SCRAM. OMEMO is an implementation of the Signal protocol on top of the XMPP protocol.
e.g. "_Expletive_! I stubbed my toe!" other-person: "lol geezer watch where you are walking." conversation quietly and temporarily moves to the pre-shared self-hosted Jabber server. Temporarily because going dark can draw attention. Feed the big chat platform boring garbage and misdirection.
Did they give a reason why are they doing this?
In a sane world, removing E2E encrypted messaging would be worthy of huge fines.
We all know what this means.
Use this https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/
Chat and file transfer over tor
Wait, people trust communication via Instagram thinking they are secure?