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lrvick
charcircuit
Centralized FOSS software can do the same thing and remove encryption. Open source is not a requirement for security.
jgtor
With reproducible builds like Signal does you can be sure the app you've downloaded matches the source code that's been audited:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...
lrvick
While I agree reproducible builds are a huge part of the answer, if you get your builds from Google Play or the App Store you have no idea if anyone has reproduced the particular build that was served to your device.
A solution to this would be independent reproducible builds like F-Droid does, but Moxie rejected this citing it would cause them to lose control of the platform and install metrics Google and Apple provide. Always thought that was a weird position for a privacy tool.
stuaxo
Unlike the proprietary stuff there isn't a strong built incentive to remove it.
mandeepj
> 'Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs,' Meta says.
Then why didn't you make the opt-in default like Signal and WhatsApp? :-)
traderj0e
Instagram wasn't set up this way. If you install it on a new phone or open it in-browser, you aren't expected to give it a recovery key to get your DMs back. They did add e2ee for FB Messenger, and it was very clunky besides not being secure at all (6-digit numeric pin).
mfru
i never even knew they had e2e available, so they cannot have been too serious about people opting in.
a shame that they now have to shut it off because people didn't use something they didn't know existed /s
milderworkacc
I'm not sure if this meets the bar for substantive and thoughtful discussion, but this kind of corporate cowardice, enforced by unelected bureaucrats standing at the bully pulpit is only going to get worse as the noose tightens on the open web.
The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.
Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.
Aerroon
Hardware attestation really sounds like one of the worst things that could've happened to computers.
SlinkyOnStairs
It's not just "the death of the open web".
These decisions are made whilst America is falling to fascism. Meta may not intend for the abolition of E2E encryption to make fascist crackdown on free speech easier, but that is the reality of what abolishing E2E encryption does.
DHS is already subpoenaing tech companies for the information about users who criticize ICE. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
The "walled garden" isn't even that big a concern anymore. The gestapo reading every single digital communication you have and showing up to harass, threaten, or simply disappear you into a camp if the infraction is severe enough. That is what's at stake here.
lyu07282
This is getting pushed in the EU too, the crucial thing to understand about where the road is headed: the goal is the inverse of who does the illicit content scanning. The idea is the government gives a list of illegal activity/speech to the platforms (such as anti-ICE activism or speaking in support of Palestinians) and then the platforms scan (presumably with LLMs) all public and private messages, deletes them and forwards them to federal and local law enforcement of the user. This is why E2E is under attack everywhere, because it makes that impossible.
chadgpt2
Do people expect that Instagram can't read their Instagram private messages? I don't think people expect that. And E2EE is not nearly as cheap as the HN crowd likes to pretend—how do those devices get those keys if not through a central service? Especially if one of them is a web browser?
torben-friis
>Do people expect that Instagram can't read their Instagram private messages? I don't think people expect that.
A deeper question is why we reached a point where people can't reasonably expect their communication to not be spied on.
Slash65
People, or at least Americans, didn’t care in 2012 when the Snowden reveal happened. We’ve been at that point for over a decade now.
dmbche
PRISM?
lovich
were like 20 years past that, at the very least 10 years with Snowden.
The people have spoken, caring about your communications not being spied on puts you in the minority. I mean like, just look at social media. You have tons of people who not only don't care about being spied on, they actively document everything for more views.
ryandrake
I would expect any message facilitated by a company's software, and going through that same company's servers to be compromised.
traderj0e
Exactly. E2EE comes with UX consequences that you can't just bolt on later. There might be something to be outraged about, but this alone isn't it.
mrexcess
The answer to most everyone question you’re asking is just, “public key cryptography”. It’s kind of disheartening to me that such basic 1990s tech as implemented by Phil Zimmerman is now obscure enough to merit questions like this.
Both parties exchange public keys through the central service. Only the possessor of the respective (on device, Secure Enclave ideally) private keys can decrypt the messages encrypted to the public key. The process can also work in reverse, encrypting with the private key so only holders of the public key can decrypt: this is called “signing”.
traderj0e
No, it's not at all this simple. This is why so many "e2ee" apps like Telegram are bogus, they ended up prioritizing UX over security because there are many places where you can't pick both.
feurio
And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?
If the answer is blind trust in a third party that runs the messaging service then I suspect that you can guess what the people asking those questions are really asking.
rileymat2
The fly in the ointment is that they control the software and updates to that closed software so can short circuit that with appropriate pressure.
onemoresoop
Ok, so drop all pretense then and blatantly scavenge through private conversations? Then take whatever from there and maybe sell it to highest bidder?
aucisson_masque
> Our messaging system has long been designed to balance user privacy with the ability to respond to scams, harassment, and other safety concerns when users report them or when required by law
TikTok about why they won’t put e2e for private messages.
I guess it’s reasonable to give up privacy to save the children, TikTok cares so much about our kids safety and wellbeing !
2ndorderthought
This is awful. They are doing this so they can literally advertise to kids. I bet their dbs aren't encrypted at rest either. Complete foolishnes
chadgpt2
Can you steelman TikTok's argument?
reddozen
HN isn't a place for serious thought nor internal critique. No one (all bots at this point?) will critically engage past the most surface level reddit tier argument.
airstrike
No, because it's terrible. There's no need to break encryption to allow you to report a user. You'd just report via a copy of an excerpt of the conversation and leave the rest of your communication private. If the user can't tamper with the extraction of that excerpt, you can trust it is correct. You could even extract hashes from both the reporting party and the reported party and compare them with zero knowledge of the actual conversation.
More sophisticated HNers can chime in with zero-knowledge proofs and whatnot to show that their argument is DOA.
tylerchilds
Put simply:
I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
al_borland
I usually defend Siri, because I’m perfectly fine trading a little functionality for security. I prefer it that way.
stego-tech
Same. The fact they're shoving AI into it and expanding it to providers who don't have privacy as a guiding principle is a key reason I'm sitting on a 14 Pro still, and why I'm exploring local alternatives with Home Assistant.
Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
tyre
They’re hosting their own Gemini, so they aren’t sacrificing to Google’s standards even if using their technology.
kypen
Home Assistant is indeed quite nice and relatively simple to set up with the Docker images provided by the team. Device setup on iOS was a little inconsistent, but has been rock solid for over a year. Check out Homebridge as well. I run both.
amazingamazing
Im curious what the threat model is that you're protecting against
linkregister
By disabling Apple "Intelligence" you bypass the risk of your prompts going to OpenAI.
fragmede
No. "You have to unlock your iphone first" is such a hindrance to using Siri for anything more than setting timers and alarms. If you're doing anything that involves gloves or a mask or getting your hands messy, like in a kitchen or something, it is just so frustrating. How about making a toggle so I can choose to be slightly less locked down for Siri, and I take full responsibility if I get hacked because of it.
glenngillen
Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > Allow Siri When Locked
yalok
building new features on top of E2EE is genuinely hard, and I've seen many companies struggle to keep innovating while staying strictly E2EE.
Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
garciasn
Then a more reasonable response is: “we cannot as effectively monetize all of the data in our advertising platform disguised as another tool entirely unless we disable E2EE and we need to be able to allow not only ourselves but others to invade your privacy even more than we already do because it’s technologically difficult to do so when we encrypt your communications.”
yalok
it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to monetization & privacy directly.
It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
vasco
It's free to not use Instagram
crazygringo
> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
That makes zero sense.
The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself.
Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data.
They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
tylerchilds
It’s not about your data.
It’s about the sum of all expression being able to be reflected back to you in such a way that Dawkins believes he’s met intelligent life.
Facebook and Google just slurped up their data centers, while Apple was encrypted.
wolvoleo
I don't buy that. They could have done more with it despite the constraints. There's been a big lack of interest from Apple for a long time. Just like every few years they introduce a completely new Mac Pro with all the fanfare and then completely lose interest and let it wither and die for 5 years.
yangm97
Siri fell behind because the bean counters at Cupertino didn’t want to spend on it, this is well documented and has nothing to do with privacy.
FireBeyond
> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy.
"Siri, do X thing" "Done"
"Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean"
Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean."
Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
Barbing
> "Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean"
It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right?
& Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think.
Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
alex1138
Do you know what Zuckerberg said in an interview? I think it was to Lex Fridman but I could be wrong
"Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years"
Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
thephyber
I’m less impressed with Zuck every time I hear something new about him.
Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.
In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
Barbing
Anything groundbreaking in advertising? Meta ad tools are pretty granular.
(Looking for anything here!)
jesterson
Not a fan of zack (quite the opposite), but he isn't wrong here. Apple indeed didn't come up with anything new. Their PR stunts each year are more and more laughable as time goes by.
Neither did Meta, but that's a different discussion
antiframe
The iPhone and Apple Watch don't count in your book? They are both younger than 20 years. I think the iPhone changed the mobile market. I don't think it was for the better but it was 'new'. It might also be just where I live but I see more Apple Watches than any other digital watches. Maybe not as 'new' but they certainly changed the watch market as well, for better or worse.
I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck. Metaverse?
dyauspitr
Privacy is the reason I’m still on team Apple.
bramhaag
Apple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2].
Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
transcriptase
The UK public can still vote for governments that don’t demand backdoors into citizens’ private data. Instead, over the past century they’ve turned their country into an ineffectual nanny state of shrinking global relevance, while a fading aristocratic and old money class desperately cling to influence over a population that no longer cares about the old titles and prestige of having attended some ‘old boys’ boarding school nobody outside of GB has ever heard of.
thephyber
Your links say that Apple complies with the laws of major countries. Which companies don’t do that?
dyauspitr
They’re very clear about when they use e2e encryption and atleast I know when they don’t. There’s multiple reasons I don’t use iCloud.
jesterson
Would you care to explain why do you think privacy with Apple is any better than other teams?
jezzamon
People here like it, but end-to-end encryption is an objectively worse user experience for people that don't care about that feature
CodeCompost
How is it a worse experience? It's ridiculously simple: The app sends a public key to the person you're talking to. The end user doesn't even need to notice it. What am I missing here?
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Valodim
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm
traderj0e
Well except for the people here who love IRC. They must not like e2ee.
jesterson
How is it "objectively worse"?
jezzamon
Main thing that comes to mind is things like this:
- If you lose you phone you lose your messages
- If you forget your password you lose your messages
- If you switch phone you often lose messages
- If you get added to a group you can't see the previous messages
jesterson
> - If you forget your password you lose your messages
This shouldn't be the case right? As password isn't related to the key messages are encrypted with.
samizdette
I guess because it is harder to back up and recover and harder to sync between devices. Signal has made a lot of progress on those though.
alex_young
Isn't this really about "protecting" minors using Instagram?
If they allow E2E encryption, they can't scan for CSAM or do other monitoring stuff effectively, so they can't provide a "safe" place for minors.
Obviously the right answer is kids shouldn't be exposed to social media at all, but more eyeballs is more important than our kids.
bnteke
cmon bud this is never what it's really about
ryandrake
It's too bad we fell so hard for centralization. In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
1. Alice's device has a publicly routable IP address with a domain name like alice.home.her.isp
2. Bob's device is has same qualities, using: bob.mobile.his.isp
Then Alice can just open her chat app up, add bob@bob.mobile.his.isp and off they go. I mean we had UNIX's "talk" for how long but instead of evolving/securing/fixing it, we blew it! And now we have all these companies 1. coming up with their own incompatible protocols and 2. inserting their stupid centralized servers as intermediaries. And now every chat message we send over the Internet has to be received and re-sent through a handful of amoral corporations.
tptacek
Why is this any better? It doesn't solve any of the identity and end-to-end encryption problems centralized messengers do; it just changes the underlying connectivity model, which is the least interesting part of the system.
nemothekid
>In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
I don't think so, and I think the very reason is because the people who opt for these decentralized solutions never really sit down and try and design a product, they just want decentralization for the sake of decentralization. For them decentralization is the product. Your alternate universe evaporates when you ask the question "what happens if Alice's device is offline?".
If you squint, the exact system you are describing is e-mail, and that has become effectively centralized, and it happened long before we had tech mega corps.
zarzavat
The issue with email is that too little is specified, and is instead just left up to providers and clients.
This specification vacuum forces centralization because the only way to build essential usability features is to own both the mail server and the mail client.
If email had evolved to move with the times such that basic QoL features were part of the spec rather than proprietary extensions, then it could have stayed decenteralized.
Contrast with what happened on the web. Yes it's imperfect but there is a standard that evolves to move with the times and there are multiple implementations of that standard.
lwansbrough
Decentralized cooperation and associated protocols is a lot harder than just inserting messages into a MySQL database and then displaying those messages.
bawolff
If people spent half the time they do wishing for decentralized messaging working on the actual problems with it, we would have decentralized messaging.
yangm97
If people spent 5 minutes googling decentralized alternatives to stuff they would realize they don’t need to build anything, just pick something and use.
cromka
Didn't you just describe email?
yangm97
No, email is federated, what he described is clearly p2p.
yangm97
Have a look at Keet, it’s a p2p IM app, works on mobile and desktop, behind NAT and all. To be honest it’s not even the only app in this game.
It just seems like nobody cares about these things until the frog already boiled.
B1FF_PSUVM
> now every chat message
"It hurts when I do that."
"Don't do that."
jesterson
Big question is how to put sgt.cia.gov or mayor.fbi.gov in the middle between alice.home.her.isp and bob.mobile.his.isp.
That is why centralised messengers are pushed hard.
And this is not to protect society from harm, as many would assume.
daft_pink
I'm not sure the value of end to end encryption for proprietary application chats. For emails and SMS messages, your messages are being sent between different multiple servers on the open internet and it opens you up to spying, but end to end encryption on instagram is only protecting your chats from Meta.
I find the end to end encryption on Facebook to be detrimental to ease of use, because you always have to use a pin code, etc for the web interface.
If you don't trust meta with your chats, you probably shouldn't be using their application to begin with.
shiandow
I'm not sure I disagree, but I would summarise it slightly differently.
If you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to upload your private messages into his own chat AI, then stop using Instagram immediately.
traderj0e
FB Messenger was nice and simple before they added the clunky e2ee feature, and it's not even secure cause it's just 6 digits of entropy.
WhatsApp e2ee is solid. It's painful if you have multiple devices, but it was designed for people to use on just one phone in the first place, not necessarily caring about chat history.
sedatk
> but end to end encryption on instagram is only protecting your chats from Meta.
No. It protects your chats from Meta and all governments of the countries where Meta operates.
In fact, I expect Instagram to be more reachable globally now because these relaxed communication standards would be welcomed by oppressive governments as they can now retrieve messages as they please for whatever purpose they deem.
ergocoder
Actually, by doing e2e encryption, Meta can say to the authorities that Meta doesn't see any message and cannot be blamed for anything. We cannot snoop user's conversation, and that's generally a good thing.
The authority holds Meta responsible anyway; they don't care about the implementation detail. They want to catch a pedo, and Meta is unable to produce evidence that helps them. Everyone else will yell at Meta for helping pedos.
You can substitute "pedo" with any other heinous crime e.g. terrorism.
And this is how we arrive at the current situation.
mrexcess
> The authority holds Meta responsible anyway
What form of accountability are you suggesting is even being leveraged, here? No law could force Meta to backdoor its encryption, afaik. Public pressure would be unlikely to work.
Is Meta afraid of anything real, or is this just blame shifting via ungrounded speculation?
ergocoder
They can because Meta has chosen to implement e2e encryption. They could have chosen not to implement e2e encryption. All within their controls.
Australia already has this law in place where a company must hand over user's conversation. A company cannot make an excuse that they themselves implement e2e to prevent themselves from reading user's messages. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029
UK has a proposal to ban encryption this year. It is still being discussed.
> Public pressure would be unlikely to work
Public pressure works to a certain degree. Do you think a product manager at Meta would want to be labeled as "protecting pedos"?
Barrin92
the entire point of encryption is that you don't trust the channel you communicate through, that's what it was invented for, communication across adversarial channels. Distrust is the only condition under which you need encryption.
In addition from a practical POV it's if anything the reverse is the case. Email encryption is larp security because plain text is the default, leaks metadata and its interfaces make it trivial for people to leak entire conversations. If there's one technology where you should just assume your messages are public, it's email before someone copy pastes or wrongly forwards your encrypted communication to fifty other people.
Private message encryption makes sense because it's now a default, information exchanged is usually personal, and the problem isn't just Meta but law enforcement extorting your data out of their hands, which encryption in the real world has prevented a few times now already.
ergocoder
It's a governance.
The executives don't want anyone else to be able to use the messages in a malicious way, so they decide to cut it at the sources of the messages i.e. e2e encryption.
This is like: corporate emails being deleted after 6 months. When an authority asks for emails from the last year, they can say they don't have it.
Now the authority can ask for the emails not to be deleted at all but then that will be a different battle the authority has to fight.
Corporate emails often don't involve pedos/terrorism, so there's much less push to retain corporate emails forever.
ardit33
I worked at Instagram during this (not at the EeE, but saw enough of it, to see that it was a mess).
I think the reason for dropping it, is more of a technical issue and user experience, rather than a 'desire' issue or company will. From my understanding, Zuck wanted this. The implementation was a mess, and folks have different expectations about messages to appear at every platform. Having messages disappear between devices/web, or having to back up encryption, keys, etc... it was just a terrible user experience. Even employees, disliked this feature.
This was not something actually asked by users, but more of a feature done in order to thwart all the types of legal issues created when folks use the platform.
At some point, I counted, there were 64 'leads', just to make this happen. Each lead, had a certain area, or surface/views, which means we are talking about hundreds of folks involved to make this happen (across fb and ig).
It was a boodongle, and it was something that users didn't ask.
Ps. I know, many here at HN really care about this, but the average user was not willing to put up with the degradation of the user experience in order to make this happen. All workarounds, require weakening E2E, which made it pointless.
Ultimately, If you want a truly E2E, you will have to use a platform specifically made for it. IG/FB are just not it.
Even Telegram, doesn't have it enabled by default, unless you specifiy it.
traderj0e
This is exactly what I expected, and it's good to hear from someone with experience.
josh-wrale
How likely is this about collection of LLM training data?
sam1r
I don't understand why they would go in this inversely-progressive direction.
Shouldn't we be aiming to increase e2e encryption for the most regularly used communication platforms?
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Centralized proprietary software on on proprietary platforms can always be opted into a special update that makes all the private keys deterministic making end to end encryption useless for anyone with knowledge of that targeted backdoor.
Only FOSS can deliver verifiable E2EE, and all centralized and proprietary solutions like Zoom, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc should end the security theater.
I applaud Meta for at least being honest about one product.