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That has always been the case no? You can't know what the person you are sending the message to is doing with it, the status of their device, or anything els

That has always been the case no? You can't know what the person you are sending the message to is doing with it, the status of their device, or anything else. I fail to see anything that Element is doing "wrong" here, the issues you are describing are issues between you and your conversation partner

asymmetric 5y ago
That is true, but there is a difference between some messages being screenshotted, and a service that acts as a bridge storing all communication that passes through an account. It's a matter of how likely it is that the assumption "my communication is not going to leak beyond the two participants" is broken. Every step in the wrong direction counts, IMO. Also, AFAIK it wouldn't be trivial to extract all the Signal chat histories from an iPhone device - this new service makes that much, much easier (not least because they'd be remotely accessible).
- ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
  It seems like you're trying to hold Element to some kind of impossible standard here. It's not like the tech they used to build the bridge didn't already exist. The bridge itself serves a specific purpose (opening up Signal to the Matrix API, allowing for the use of a single app), and succeeds at that. Of course there's a trade-off, and the team (at least allegedly) appears to be working on encrypted bridges so that even if the bridge decrypts from Signal, it re-encrypts on the homeserver at rest in a way that only the user (not the bridge) can decrypt in the future. I think the complaint here is "you advertised a service doing a thing that was already possible, people might use this." I may be mis-characterizing that, but I think it's worth stepping back and thinking a bit more on the actual threat model you face, and how the proposed product (Element One) somehow subverts that. Sure it can do so at scale, but that just means this is one incremental improvement that needs more work, not that the idea needs to be thrown out entirely.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Companies whose mission is centered on user control and privacy can be held to a higher standard than other companies when it comes to these kinds of questions. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that Element should have tossed out the idea of supporting Signal for this specific software offering, given the potential for collateral damage in the form of person A using it without person B being aware of this, particularly if person A does not grok that they are compromising person B's communications if they are using it. Disclaimers and warnings are not universal solutions to questions on ethics since they are not certain to be read or understood and will have some failure %. If the residual negative effects are likely to exceed the kinds of outcomes a company's core values can tolerate, then making those states unrepresentable by abandoning product ideas is sane.

asymmetric 5y ago

That is true, but there is a difference between some messages being screenshotted, and a service that acts as a bridge storing all communication that passes through an account. It's a matter of how likely it is that the assumption "my communication is not going to leak beyond the two participants" is broken. Every step in the wrong direction counts, IMO. Also, AFAIK it wouldn't be trivial to extract all the Signal chat histories from an iPhone device - this new service makes that much, much easier (not least because they'd be remotely accessible).

ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
It seems like you're trying to hold Element to some kind of impossible standard here. It's not like the tech they used to build the bridge didn't already exist. The bridge itself serves a specific purpose (opening up Signal to the Matrix API, allowing for the use of a single app), and succeeds at that. Of course there's a trade-off, and the team (at least allegedly) appears to be working on encrypted bridges so that even if the bridge decrypts from Signal, it re-encrypts on the homeserver at rest in a way that only the user (not the bridge) can decrypt in the future. I think the complaint here is "you advertised a service doing a thing that was already possible, people might use this." I may be mis-characterizing that, but I think it's worth stepping back and thinking a bit more on the actual threat model you face, and how the proposed product (Element One) somehow subverts that. Sure it can do so at scale, but that just means this is one incremental improvement that needs more work, not that the idea needs to be thrown out entirely.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Companies whose mission is centered on user control and privacy can be held to a higher standard than other companies when it comes to these kinds of questions. It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that Element should have tossed out the idea of supporting Signal for this specific software offering, given the potential for collateral damage in the form of person A using it without person B being aware of this, particularly if person A does not grok that they are compromising person B's communications if they are using it. Disclaimers and warnings are not universal solutions to questions on ethics since they are not certain to be read or understood and will have some failure %. If the residual negative effects are likely to exceed the kinds of outcomes a company's core values can tolerate, then making those states unrepresentable by abandoning product ideas is sane.