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"In March, a spokesperson for Meta told The Guardian that the decision to abandon encryption was due to low uptake. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," the spokesperson said."
I wonder what it's like being a spokesperson for a company (or administration) where everyone including yourself knows your statements are misleading at best.
It feels absurd to have seen E2EE fought for and considered table stakes by many users, especially the technically-oriented, now rolled back a short time later by these companies who never really cared about privacy to begin with and clearly don't expect any backlash.
It also feels like the wide-scale desperate adoption of AI has weakened claims about the essential nature of privacy, now that everyone has demonstrated that they are happy to feed their innermost thoughts, secrets, personal conflicts, code, medical records, legal documents, etc. into cloud AI platforms.
True e2e makes it hard to sync a new device and makes it easy to lose all your history. The company also can't help you recover your messages and it's unclear for normal people why (often met with anger or disappointment).
Unencrypted messaging is easier and more convenient, just login from anywhere and done. So there are actual technical and rational reasons to choose against e2e.
We ran into the same tradeoff. Ended up using Signal's linked devices feature which handles new device sync pretty well. The "lost history" problem is real but honestly most people don't need messages from 3 years ago. The convenience argument holds for casual chat, just not for anything sensitive.
I have so many problems with using Matrix with multiple devices and most of them are caused by its encryption. If there was a magic wand that would add encryption to a system without changing anything else there would be no reason not to use it, but the reality is that E2EE does place limits on the overall functionality of the system.
This is why Telegram and Discord are so popular. They are popular because they work well, and part of the reason they work well is not bothering with E2EE. For instance, when you join a group chat, the server can just send you the message history (if enabled) and there's no need to negotiate keys with every other participant. There no "joining...", there is no "message will appear shortly...", you just press the button and you're in.
I've never seen an E2EE group chat that could remain stable with more than a few hundred participants. Even Matrix gives up and just makes it unencrypted at that point.
Has anyone actually separated E2EE costs from federation costs in Matrix? My guess is most of the clunkiness comes from federation, not encryption itself. Discord is centralized — there's no structural reason it couldn't add E2EE and still feel smooth. The causation here seems muddled.
This is not correct. People are happy to give up privacy in exchange for the convenience of being able to restore message history remotely, even if they lose their key.
The premise assumes users understand what they're choosing. Encryption isn't a visible feature people compare when picking a chat app. They pick what their friends use. Calling that a "market failure" is a stretch — it's just network effects doing what they always do.
This might not be obvious to some, like it wasn't to me, but Instagram chat history is used for profiling. I noticed when I chatted with someone about something on Instagram, and instantly reels with the subject of our discussion started appearing in my feed.
Failing to connect those dots is (unfortunately) what keeps many, many people from moving their otherwise private conversations to a more private channel. I think you're right that it bears mentioning.
All of the above and anything else you can think of that can be tied back to 1.) profit; or 2.) the accumulation of clout with authorities (in that order).
From working on a related messaging pipeline: the ad targeting angle is probably overrated here. Message content is genuinely hard to parse into signals at scale. The policing use case seems more plausible — they've been under real regulatory pressure to act on certain content categories, and E2E was a convenient shield.
Technically the messages are still encrypted -- just not end-to-end. TLS in transit remains, Meta just regains access to plaintext. IIRC the E2EE was opt-in anyway, so most people were already unencrypted by default. Doesn't make it better, just wanted to flag the distinction.
I wonder what it's like being a spokesperson for a company (or administration) where everyone including yourself knows your statements are misleading at best.