Before reading this article, I used to believe that IT companies deeply respected users’ human rights, spending millions of dollars to build end‑to‑end encryption. But thanks to this very article, I learned that they were actually saving tens of millions in administrative litigation costs – costs they would otherwise have had to pay every month to respond to wiretap warrants.

Some might call this a “cryptographic innovation.” I call it “the technical outsourcing of legal disclaimers.” Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a Harvard Law School legal team on my side.

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prmph 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

End-to-end encryption is about protecting data at rest on the vendor's servers. TLS only secures data in transit.

The article's argument is a bit like saying TLS protects plain-text passwords in transit, so there is no need to store them in hashed form in the database.

Sure, the article makes good arguments about the trust that is still implicit in E2EE, but it goes too far in its dismissal of it.

	▲	akimbostrawman a day ago \| parent [-]
		>End-to-end encryption is about protecting data at rest on the vendor's servers No its literally in the name. It's about encryption between the end points of data communication. In most cases between two clients with the middle man server exchanging and hosting the encrypted data between them. Its about protecting live data which in practice also results in at rest data protection because all data is encrypted which only the end points can decrypt. FDE for example only protects at rest data but does nothing to prevent live data extraction.

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memoriyato3 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

having E2E encryption is a marketing feature, you need it if you want to be competitive in the market, so this is another incentive to add it

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archerx 4 days ago | parent [-]

I never believed that the messages were truly E2E encrypted and I know for sure when WhatsApp retroactively censored a message I sent to a friend a while back, I found that super sus.

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beng-nl 4 days ago | parent [-]

Can you be sure WhatsApp retroactively censored a message? Implying someone else but the direct recipient could read and delete/change it? (I believe group chats are different, forgot the details.) I don’t want to be dismissive but.. well i dont believe this is the best explanation given just these observations.

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archerx 3 days ago | parent [-]

It said the message was removed for violating some rule or something. The message was a link to a website meta does not approve of but it was removed like a day later.

	▲	beng-nl 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Wow, that is honestly a bit freaky - first I’ve heard of anything like that. I will assume it was a client side action, but still horribly invasive if that’s how it went. I’ll try to find more about this possibility.