Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sweis 1972 days ago
It's a falsifiable assumption. Audit the binaries if you want to convince yourself. You will see code to generate and use keys locally, with no mechanism to fetch or share keys from a server.

If you want to go beyond generic concerns, there are plenty of academic papers that have looked at Facebook Secret Conversations, found actual issues, and helped get them fixed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00145-020-09360-1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-63697-9_... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96884-1_...

2 comments

Why are you so eager to trust an organization that has so often demonstrated it's not worthy of trust?

This is Facebook, for pete's sake. The same company that conducted psychological experiments with zero clinical/ethical oversight by manipulating its users' feeds to see if it could cause depression/anxiety (or the opposite).

Facebook is evil and you should not trust them even a little bit.

He is so eager, because he was a software engineer at Facebook. His site is in his profile.
The app can auto-update itself at any time and install some binaries that do share the key with the server; trust is virtue of every single thing the company (im this case FB) can do and auto-updates is one of them.