I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-e

I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications". >Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption). No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß] Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate. ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.