4 ms·
"End-To-End Encrypted ‘Secret Conversations’" in software that is ordinarily used to harvest electronic phone books and rummage through user photos, from a comp
by etiam 10y ago
"End-To-End Encrypted ‘Secret Conversations’" in software that is ordinarily used to harvest electronic phone books and rummage through user photos, from a company that made its whole fortune trying to obliterate privacy as a part of human culture?
It's going to be pretty high standards of proof to give this anything that resembles credibility.
- emdd 10y agoThis is exactly what I'm thinking. I expect a post in he next day or so from Open Whisper people to lend credibility to this project. They seem to be the Go-To these days. Edit: and it is http://www.whispersystems.org/blog/facebook-messenger http://www.whispersystems.org/blog/facebook-messenger
- Sylos 10y agoYeah, but then, again, how much credibility does Open Whisper Systems actually deserve? For me personally, they've lost a huge chunk of credibility by lending credibility to companies for apparently rewriting the definition of "end-to-end-encryption" from previously referring to the users as the end to now referring to some magical proprietary blackbox as the end. And the other chunk of credibility sort of died off, as they apparently seem to think depending on proprietary Google software for their products is how you do privacy. That is, their Android-client for Signal depends on Google Play Services for receiving notifications, even though LibreSignal exists, which is a fork specifically to remove that dependency, and from which they could have easily pulled that changed code in as a fallback. And when they figured they should make a desktop client, apparently the best technology that they could think of, was a Google Chrome extension.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sweis 10y agoI am confident Facebook will meet your high standards when it comes to E2E encryption for Messenger.
- emdd 10y ago/S?
- sweis 10y agoHere's a whitepaper to start: https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/secret_conversations_whitepaper.pdf https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/secret_conv...
- sweis 10y agoAnd we had some smart outside people review it: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/751403163408826368 https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/75140316340882636...
- atonse 10y agoThanks for doing this – it's very exciting news. I've avoided FB Messenger for years and now downloaded it today due to this.
- strgrd 10y agoThe first question you should ask in evaluating any encryption or privacy-based software is, 'do I trust the provider?' What sane person would ever trust Facebook to keep something private? If anything, the addition of "secret conversations" will be more intrusive, because this service delivers more nodes to the social graph: how many secret conversations, with whom, where, at what times, etc. Facebook and the global spy regimes it provides content for care more about building a network of associations than actual content. Who cares about the needle when you can control the haystack?
- StavrosK 10y agoCredibility isn't binary. Facebook was way down to 0% on the credibility scale, and now it's up to 5%. Let's applaud this move instead of being hostile when they're trying to improve, because the only thing that will achieve is to discourage improvement.