[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...

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It doesn't have to be, but that's not really an argument for claiming it isn't. Considering how deeply embedded privacy violation is in Meta's corporate DNA, is there any reason other than hilariously naïve and inexplicably charitable, hypothetical speculation to believe this is not motivated by more privacy violation for profit, just like literally every single thing Meta has done in the entire history of the company? No? Didn't think so.

[yalok]

were you in that room where Adam was making that call? No? didn't think so...

Just give people some benefit of doubt. There're much simpler ways to explain certain things that suspecting some universal evil in every move...

[mfru]

not if it is one of the companies famous for going the extra mile of being "evil" / a corporate shit hole stealing every thought you ever have to better sell you stuff you don't need

[tylerchilds]

From talking to people from Meta, they don’t believe in E2EE because “it’s decrypted on the other end” which they take as “becomes insecure in exactly the way we’ve designed the sausage factory”

They’re a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for why it is a futile effort for trying to secure information near them.

[vasco]

It's free to not use Instagram