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I have a feeling that they will live up to their encryption promise and this will actually provide them with a long term messaging service that can provide some
by flycaliguy 8y ago
I have a feeling that they will live up to their encryption promise and this will actually provide them with a long term messaging service that can provide some stability for their company. The messages themselves are likely not valuable enough to creep into compared to the unified metadata that all this messaging can bring in.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoI think so. It's rather betting the value lies in the social graph, not in being able to tell that this user is a democrat voter with a disabled child and that is a republican who is black. [#] If facebook already holds that data on users and does not "give it up" then yes totally - they raise the bar so that absolutely no competitor can garner that data - a perfect moat. If somehow a regulator forces them to anonymise the data - they are at the same stage as any competitor. I guess that's the regulator challenge? [#] ie arbitrary meta data about users but that is extremely valuable to advertisers and political campaigns. do not take the examples as meaning anything :-)
- wtmt 8y agoI have just the opposite feeling. Facebook is going to remove end to end encryption as the default from WhatsApp and turn it into something like Messenger or Telegram, where chats are by default not end to end encrypted, and the user has to explicitly choose it. There'd be some backlash in the press. But most users won't bother about it, just like they don't bother about all the Facebook scandals to move off the platform or care enough to look for better privacy elsewhere. What's more, Facebook can, and will, paint this as something it's doing in order to monitor content and handle fake news, earning brownie points from various governments who'd be eager to tap into this new source for surveillance.