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

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.

	▲	bsimpson 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel like Messenger was originally a new front-end for the send message feature of thefacebook.com's social network for college students. It was based on the PHP architecture where all the messages are in a database and you just render HTML to show them. That grew into the Messenger mobile app. They eventually added private messaging, but it was never popular/defaulted because users expected the chat moles on facebook.com to be able to show the same messages as the mobile app. If facebook.com can't read your messages, it can't show them there.
	▲	giancarlostoro 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That era of Facebook was the last shred of respect I had for them, but it was starting to die for me. Now I've noticed younger generations really don't seem to care about Facebook, and friends I grew up with who used to post on Facebook no longer do.
	▲	lxgr 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I feel like if e.g. Whatsapp were not end-to-end encrypted, it would have faced significantly more regulatory scrutiny in the EU and other places where it's effectively replaced phone calls and SMS.

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nickburns 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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jckahn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I assume Meta has backdoor access.

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nickburns 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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towers 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then why end the feature? Would it not be better to maintain the facade and continue to benefit from it?

	▲	Keeeeeeeks 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If they formally sunset the feature, there’s less of a case for someone to sue. One can’t say they didn’t know or consent to their group chat info being used for training data if there’s no reason to assume your chat data is private

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chabes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This has always been my assumption as well.

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rapnie 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.