Instagram Encrypted Messaging Ends on Friday, May 8

giwook•40 minutes ago

"In March, a spokesperson for Meta told The Guardian that the decision to abandon encryption was due to low uptake. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," the spokesperson said."

I wonder what it's like being a spokesperson for a company (or administration) where everyone including yourself knows your statements are misleading at best.

emsign•5 minutes ago

It feels similar to being a buzzing fridge. These people possibly can't have any feelings or else they couldn't do that job.

TheChaplain•30 minutes ago

I've noticed it is a quite common attitude in society, not paid enough to care so they don't.

GlacierFox•19 minutes ago

What do you mean? It's a depressing thought people only care about things for financial incentive.

godzillabrennus•33 minutes ago

Being good at serving the interests of wealthy people as a paid liar has proven to be a demonstrably good skill set for a career in politics.

cdrnsf•about 1 hour ago

Everything Meta has built is antithetical to privacy. I’m surprised this feature existed at all.

roughly•29 minutes ago

I’m curious if this was built off the work Moxie did with them back in the day, but as I recall Facebook Messenger had E2EE built off Signal’s technology a decade or so back, and the zeitgeist back then was at least a little bit less user hostile.

nickburns•about 1 hour ago

Probably figured they'd ride the wave of E2EE messaging while public popularity crested to draw some conversations (group chats?) onto the platform, just to inevitably rug pull later.

jckahn•about 1 hour ago

I assume Meta has backdoor access.

nickburns•44 minutes ago

Then why end the more insidious route rather than stay the course?

chabes•about 1 hour ago

This has always been my assumption as well.

rapnie•40 minutes ago

Given how few upvotes and comments this submission gets, no one here is surprised at the disappearance of the feature. I guess at 8 May there'll be a higher upvoted submission that better matches the relevance of Meta's move in HN submission history.

brandon272•22 minutes ago

It feels absurd to have seen E2EE fought for and considered table stakes by many users, especially the technically-oriented, now rolled back a short time later by these companies who never really cared about privacy to begin with and clearly don't expect any backlash.

It also feels like the wide-scale desperate adoption of AI has weakened claims about the essential nature of privacy, now that everyone has demonstrated that they are happy to feed their innermost thoughts, secrets, personal conflicts, code, medical records, legal documents, etc. into cloud AI platforms.

dmos62•28 minutes ago

This might not be obvious to some, like it wasn't to me, but Instagram chat history is used for profiling. I noticed when I chatted with someone about something on Instagram, and instantly reels with the subject of our discussion started appearing in my feed.

nickburns•25 minutes ago

Failing to connect those dots is (unfortunately) what keeps many, many people from moving their otherwise private conversations to a more private channel. I think you're right that it bears mentioning.

copper-float•12 minutes ago

What's a sufficiently private/secure messaging platform? Signal comes to mind, but I'm open to alternatives.

SoftTalker•6 minutes ago

GPG-encrypted email.

Ifkaluva•26 minutes ago

What’s the endgame here?

- just better ad targeting? (lol if so)

- policing accounts for various possible infractions?

- training data for ML models?

nickburns•23 minutes ago

All of the above and anything else you can think of that can be tied back to 1.) profit; or 2.) the accumulation of clout with authorities (in that order).

emsign•7 minutes ago

Will the messages be used as training data now?

nrmitchi•4 minutes ago

Yes.

Instagram Encrypted Messaging Ends on Friday, May 8

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