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“What self interested, selfish reason do these terrible people have to this ostensibly good thing?” - paraphrasing your question. Answer - Message content wasn

“What self interested, selfish reason do these terrible people have to this ostensibly good thing?” - paraphrasing your question. Answer - Message content wasn’t used for advertising. I believe it had been tried at some point and found to be sort of useless. But people like you won’t believe that, so end to end encryption might help build trust and increase engagement.

akomtu 3y ago
e2e encryption can be negotiation chip with gov agencies: "we turn off encryption this time, but you'll forget about our shady ads business"
- nindalf 3y ago
  Firstly E2E can’t be turned off on a dime. WhatsApp e2e has never been turned off since it was turned on. Secondly, please educate yourself about what the government actually thinks about the ad business you’ve described as “shady”. Even if it was “shady” to show ads based on preferences and never reveal or sell those preferences to a third party … the elected representatives in government really like having social media ads as an option in elections. Here, read this so you can learn how government actually influences social media to do their bidding - https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboned https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboned > The senator’s office told Katie that they really wanted to ban that practice but knew they would never get it through the Senate since so many campaigns relied on the tools for their elections. So instead, they said they were going to pressure tech companies like ours to ban the use of the tool in the hopes that if one of us did so, the others would as well. Although we did not stop using Custom Audiences entirely, Facebook and other platforms did dramatically reduce the targeting options for political advertisers.
  - kyboren 3y ago
    > show ads based on preferences and never reveal or sell those preferences to a third party That's not how modern ad markets work. Those preferences are indeed revealed to third parties, specifically ad exchanges and DSPs, as part of the bidstream data. Now, you say, those bidstream data contain no PII! Except that de-anonymizing those data is absolutely key to targeting, and is widely practiced. Recently in the news: "Patternz", an Israeli spy-tech company, for years hoovered up and stored all the bidstream data across 87 ad exchanges and SSPs including Google, Yahoo, MoPub, AdColony, and OpenX, de-anonymized them, and claims to have profiles on billions of users including their location history, home address, interests, information about 'people nearby', 'co-workers' and 'family members'. (See also: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg ) Please stop spreading dangerous misinformation about the threat programmatic advertising poses to our privacy and national security. Your extremely sensitive data are being passed around willy-nilly and this will not change until RTB is outlawed.
    - nindalf 3y ago
      > claims
d42a6 3y ago
A security conscious person should assume that whatever can be exploited will be exploited - especially when dealing with actors that are economically incentivized to do creepy things.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
We still have to trust that Zuck is going to do e2e correctly. I just don't have that trust in him. Messenger app is doing the encrypting, and I don't trust that FB isn't doing it in a way that they get the message also.
stevage 3y ago
That's only a valid paraphrase if you think prioritising making money and value for shareholders above all else makes you "terrible people". Personally I doubt that any more than low single digit percentages of people care at all about E2EE. Even me, as a tech person, I don't care about it, and I actively avoid Signal because of the inconveniences that E2EE causes. This has been a very big effort to implement, and FB no longer deploys those kinds of resources on vague whims. I think most likely something to do with regulations, and not wanting to be on the hook for user message content, but it's just wild guessing really.

akomtu 3y ago

e2e encryption can be negotiation chip with gov agencies: "we turn off encryption this time, but you'll forget about our shady ads business"

nindalf 3y ago
Firstly E2E can’t be turned off on a dime. WhatsApp e2e has never been turned off since it was turned on. Secondly, please educate yourself about what the government actually thinks about the ad business you’ve described as “shady”. Even if it was “shady” to show ads based on preferences and never reveal or sell those preferences to a third party … the elected representatives in government really like having social media ads as an option in elections. Here, read this so you can learn how government actually influences social media to do their bidding - https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboned https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/jawboned > The senator’s office told Katie that they really wanted to ban that practice but knew they would never get it through the Senate since so many campaigns relied on the tools for their elections. So instead, they said they were going to pressure tech companies like ours to ban the use of the tool in the hopes that if one of us did so, the others would as well. Although we did not stop using Custom Audiences entirely, Facebook and other platforms did dramatically reduce the targeting options for political advertisers.
- kyboren 3y ago
  > show ads based on preferences and never reveal or sell those preferences to a third party That's not how modern ad markets work. Those preferences are indeed revealed to third parties, specifically ad exchanges and DSPs, as part of the bidstream data. Now, you say, those bidstream data contain no PII! Except that de-anonymizing those data is absolutely key to targeting, and is widely practiced. Recently in the news: "Patternz", an Israeli spy-tech company, for years hoovered up and stored all the bidstream data across 87 ad exchanges and SSPs including Google, Yahoo, MoPub, AdColony, and OpenX, de-anonymized them, and claims to have profiles on billions of users including their location history, home address, interests, information about 'people nearby', 'co-workers' and 'family members'. (See also: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-5bA6QW8AAyfSK.jpg ) Please stop spreading dangerous misinformation about the threat programmatic advertising poses to our privacy and national security. Your extremely sensitive data are being passed around willy-nilly and this will not change until RTB is outlawed.
  - nindalf 3y ago
    > claims

d42a6 3y ago

A security conscious person should assume that whatever can be exploited will be exploited - especially when dealing with actors that are economically incentivized to do creepy things.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

We still have to trust that Zuck is going to do e2e correctly. I just don't have that trust in him. Messenger app is doing the encrypting, and I don't trust that FB isn't doing it in a way that they get the message also.

stevage 3y ago

That's only a valid paraphrase if you think prioritising making money and value for shareholders above all else makes you "terrible people". Personally I doubt that any more than low single digit percentages of people care at all about E2EE. Even me, as a tech person, I don't care about it, and I actively avoid Signal because of the inconveniences that E2EE causes. This has been a very big effort to implement, and FB no longer deploys those kinds of resources on vague whims. I think most likely something to do with regulations, and not wanting to be on the hook for user message content, but it's just wild guessing really.