alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure the value of end to end encryption for proprietary application chats. For emails and SMS messages, your messages are being sent between different multiple servers on the open internet and it opens you up to spying, but end to end encryption on instagram is only protecting your chats from Meta.
I find the end to end encryption on Facebook to be detrimental to ease of use, because you always have to use a pin code, etc for the web interface.
If you don't trust meta with your chats, you probably shouldn't be using their application to begin with.
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FB Messenger was nice and simple before they added the clunky e2ee feature, and it's not even secure cause it's just 6 digits of entropy.
WhatsApp e2ee is solid. It's painful if you have multiple devices, but it was designed for people to use on just one phone in the first place, not necessarily caring about chat history.
> but end to end encryption on instagram is only protecting your chats from Meta.
No. It protects your chats from Meta and all governments of the countries where Meta operates.
In fact, I expect Instagram to be more reachable globally now because these relaxed communication standards would be welcomed by oppressive governments as they can now retrieve messages as they please for whatever purpose they deem.
Actually, by doing e2e encryption, Meta can say to the authorities that Meta doesn't see any message and cannot be blamed for anything. We cannot snoop user's conversation, and that's generally a good thing.
The authority holds Meta responsible anyway; they don't care about the implementation detail. They want to catch a pedo, and Meta is unable to produce evidence that helps them. Everyone else will yell at Meta for helping pedos.
You can substitute "pedo" with any other heinous crime e.g. terrorism.
And this is how we arrive at the current situation.
the entire point of encryption is that you don't trust the channel you communicate through, that's what it was invented for, communication across adversarial channels. Distrust is the only condition under which you need encryption.
In addition from a practical POV it's if anything the reverse is the case. Email encryption is larp security because plain text is the default, leaks metadata and its interfaces make it trivial for people to leak entire conversations. If there's one technology where you should just assume your messages are public, it's email before someone copy pastes or wrongly forwards your encrypted communication to fifty other people.
Private message encryption makes sense because it's now a default, information exchanged is usually personal, and the problem isn't just Meta but law enforcement extorting your data out of their hands, which encryption in the real world has prevented a few times now already.
I'm not sure I disagree, but I would summarise it slightly differently.
If you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to upload your private messages into his own chat AI, then stop using Instagram immediately.