Then why didn't you make the opt-in default like Signal and WhatsApp? :-)
The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.
Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.
These decisions are made whilst America is falling to fascism. Meta may not intend for the abolition of E2E encryption to make fascist crackdown on free speech easier, but that is the reality of what abolishing E2E encryption does.
DHS is already subpoenaing tech companies for the information about users who criticize ICE. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
The "walled garden" isn't even that big a concern anymore. The gestapo reading every single digital communication you have and showing up to harass, threaten, or simply disappear you into a camp if the infraction is severe enough. That is what's at stake here.
A deeper question is why we reached a point where people can't reasonably expect their communication to not be spied on.
The people have spoken, caring about your communications not being spied on puts you in the minority. I mean like, just look at social media. You have tons of people who not only don't care about being spied on, they actively document everything for more views.
Both parties exchange public keys through the central service. Only the possessor of the respective (on device, Secure Enclave ideally) private keys can decrypt the messages encrypted to the public key. The process can also work in reverse, encrypting with the private key so only holders of the public key can decrypt: this is called “signing”.
If the answer is blind trust in a third party that runs the messaging service then I suspect that you can guess what the people asking those questions are really asking.
If Meta are turning it off then I guess it's reasonable to assume that there is something to turn off.
Eave could just do key negotiation with Alice and separately do key negotiation with Bob. You have to use a slightly more complicated cryptographic protocol to avoid this issue.
If a messaging app is showing you message history in a private browsing window then perhaps the encryption key for that history is derived from your password or something like that; that can be done locally so that all the server ever sees is encrypted data.
edit: misread your message; if you have two sessions active at the same time, then yes I would expect both sessions to receive the same messages.
E2EE is a fail-secure design. In case of any doubt it deletes your private messages. When applied to this case I don't think the downside of constantly losing all your messages outweighs the upside of Facebook pretending they don't have a copy of all of them.
As to whether or not Meta have been lying about it, then that would be on-brand for them, but then what are they turning off if so? Or maybe the whole thing is theatre, and I should better disconnect from the internet altogether? I don't see the value in speculating about that.
Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what used to be entry level knowledge in “our thing” has evidently become so obscure.
The tricky part is keeping it from being "permitted" by a crappy contract of adhesion. Banning it entirely would make it very difficult to buy/sell backup services...
I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
That makes zero sense.
The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself.
Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data.
They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
I prefer to read reference material and do research instead of asking chatbots, for instance, because it helps the material stick better and enables me to make broader connections to disparate pieces of knowledge.
I also prefer technology to be narrow in scope and function, so I can spend more time enjoying life and less time troubleshooting why some needless complexity has failed again. This extends to voice assistants that consistently fumble on accents and grammar when asking for more complex queries, and often want to send data out of my LAN to some random server I have no control over just to process something that could be done on any of the myriad of GPUs and CPUs in my home instead.
Despite the EULA, TOS, and Privacy Polices governing these interactions, I intrinsically don’t trust a relationship that requires revalidation of those policies every time an update is pushed, whose changes fail to be summarized, and which force me into hostile relationships with the vendors. I also generally believe that as live services, there is no sufficient incentive for security or privacy but ample incentive for data mining and prolonged/frequent interactivity. Repeated incidents of supposedly “anonymous” and “private” conversations or data being inappropriately disclosed or compromised do not help lend any sense of security to said services, at least to me. Then you consider the wider economic environment prioritizing immediate gains over sustainable business practices, and my own personal preference for building and nurturing long-term infrastructure to solve my problems on a consistent basis, and it’s less a threat model and more just incompatibility between my personal needs and corporate goals.
Explicitly: I have that turned on and I still need to unlock before using.
Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy.
"Siri, do X thing" "Done"
"Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean"
Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean."
Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right?
& Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think.
Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
"Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years"
Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.
In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
(Looking for anything here!)
Neither did Meta, but that's a different discussion
I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck. Metaverse?
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1].
Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html
I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however.
I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the phone the way they did the PC - stifling innovation. So it's always funny for me to hear Gates whine about losing mobile to Android.
— Rich Miner (https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765)
Whereas Microsoft and Google care about their users like a farmer cares about a herd of pigs.
Precisely because it's your feelings, not objective observation.
No public company would care of their users, even remotely.
Indeed, during Jobs time it actually worked that way, but that time is long gone.
The OS is not nearly the best, just like laptops.
They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.
TikTok about why they won’t put e2e for private messages.
I guess it’s reasonable to give up privacy to save the children, TikTok cares so much about our kids safety and wellbeing !
More sophisticated HNers can chime in with zero-knowledge proofs and whatnot to show that their argument is DOA.
But I'll humor the notion and say that, yes, I'd rather not let them see me dancing in my underwear unless I've explicitly decided to share it.
If they allow E2E encryption, they can't scan for CSAM or do other monitoring stuff effectively, so they can't provide a "safe" place for minors.
Obviously the right answer is kids shouldn't be exposed to social media at all, but more eyeballs is more important than our kids.
1. Alice's device has a publicly routable IP address with a domain name like alice.home.her.isp
2. Bob's device is has same qualities, using: bob.mobile.his.isp
Then Alice can just open her chat app up, add bob@bob.mobile.his.isp and off they go. I mean we had UNIX's "talk" for how long but instead of evolving/securing/fixing it, we blew it! And now we have all these companies 1. coming up with their own incompatible protocols and 2. inserting their stupid centralized servers as intermediaries. And now every chat message we send over the Internet has to be received and re-sent through a handful of amoral corporations.
I don't think so, and I think the very reason is because the people who opt for these decentralized solutions never really sit down and try and design a product, they just want decentralization for the sake of decentralization. For them decentralization is the product. Your alternate universe evaporates when you ask the question "what happens if Alice's device is offline?".
If you squint, the exact system you are describing is e-mail, and that has become effectively centralized, and it happened long before we had tech mega corps.
"It hurts when I do that."
"Don't do that."
That is why centralised messengers are pushed hard.
And this is not to protect society from harm, as many would assume.
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.
If you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to upload your private messages into his own chat AI, then stop using Instagram immediately.
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.
What form of accountability are you suggesting is even being leveraged, here? No law could force Meta to backdoor its encryption, afaik. Public pressure would be unlikely to work.
Is Meta afraid of anything real, or is this just blame shifting via ungrounded speculation?
Australia already has this law in place where a company must hand over user's conversation. A company cannot make an excuse that they themselves implement e2e to prevent themselves from reading user's messages. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029
UK has a proposal to ban encryption this year. It is still being discussed.
> Public pressure would be unlikely to work
Public pressure works to a certain degree. Do you think a product manager at Meta would want to be labeled as "protecting pedos"?
I think that Meta can afford as much PR as they would need to out-message this sort of BS, again if they were inclined to protect user privacy in the first place. Look at Apple.
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.
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.
The executives don't want anyone else to be able to use the messages in a malicious way, so they decide to cut it at the sources of the messages i.e. e2e encryption.
This is like: corporate emails being deleted after 6 months. When an authority asks for emails from the last year, they can say they don't have it.
Now the authority can ask for the emails not to be deleted at all but then that will be a different battle the authority has to fight.
Corporate emails often don't involve pedos/terrorism, so there's much less push to retain corporate emails forever.
Shouldn't we be aiming to increase e2e encryption for the most regularly used communication platforms?
I think the reason for dropping it, is more of a technical issue and user experience, rather than a 'desire' issue or company will. From my understanding, Zuck wanted this. The implementation was a mess, and folks have different expectations about messages to appear at every platform. Having messages disappear between devices/web, or having to back up encryption, keys, etc... it was just a terrible user experience. Even employees, disliked this feature.
This was not something actually asked by users, but more of a feature done in order to thwart all the types of legal issues created when folks use the platform.
At some point, I counted, there were 64 'leads', just to make this happen. Each lead, had a certain area, or surface/views, which means we are talking about hundreds of folks involved to make this happen (across fb and ig).
It was a boodongle, and it was something that users didn't ask.
Ps. I know, many here at HN really care about this, but the average user was not willing to put up with the degradation of the user experience in order to make this happen. All workarounds, require weakening E2E, which made it pointless.
Ultimately, If you want a truly E2E, you will have to use a platform specifically made for it. IG/FB are just not it.
Even Telegram, doesn't have it enabled by default, unless you specifiy it.
Meta is part of the reason Signals E2EE spread and E2EE became ubiquitous in general.
Many governments have also turned against E2EE and I suspect it's gone from a shield where you can say we can't really help you get that data, to a constant pressure.
It’s like using a web browser distributed by a an ad company whose business model is all about tracking folks
While they ALREADY probably only have Messenger for nefarious reasons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
He's a bit of a... something. That might get a 'low effort comment' moniker attached to it. Rhymes with ociopath