“Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”

Surveillance on the general public is bought by employers/businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA/FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom. The USA has long aspired to be a place of outstanding liberty; to run your own business, to say what you want, to own what you want, and in a less corrupt landscape relative to the rest of the world. With its lead in citizen surveillance it is fast becoming the opposite.

Signal on the other hand has made eliminated their access to much of the metadata, including contact information [1] (using SGX sandboxes which is no perfect solution but better what Facebook has) and information about who has sent a specific message [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;private-contact-discovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;private-contact-discovery&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;sealed-sender&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;sealed-sender&#x2F;</a>

The Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft.<p>Doesn&#x27;t it feel weird that there used to be positive facebook stories, but now its all negative 24&#x2F;7?

Can someone fill me in on why people are <i>upset</i> Facbook will be consolidating DMs&#x2F;PMs accross services - <i>using E2E</i>?<p>I&#x27;ve went other the past news releases, it seems to be a <i>good</i> thing to me.

Guys, just delete your Facebook.<p>One of the underrated benefits is not bothering to read articles like this because it doesn&#x27;t effect you ... since you deleted your Facebook.

It&#x27;s really annoying how so much facebook &#x27;news&#x27; and conspiracy theory makes it to the front page of HN. I hereby propose renaming Hacker News to Facebook News.<p>Edit: there&#x27;s no way that this comment is any <i>more</i> off topic that the vast majority of the facebook crap posted here.

I read another tech journalist twitter thread that hypothesized it was to make it harder for a regulator to break up the company because once combined it would be near impossible to break up without negatively impacting users.

Facebook encrypted messaging! What&#x27;s next, military intelligence? How about a vegan big-mac? Maybe a quality automobile by GM?<p>I think steganography is an excellent way to deliver encrypted messaging to consumers. It has so many inherent features that I&#x27;m surprised it isn&#x27;t already widely used. Let&#x27;s see:<p>- easy to recognize but hard to detect<p>- can pass through any channel that accepts images<p>- massive storage capacity (10MB+ depending on how you roll)<p>- encryption easily baked in!<p>- many additional use cases (store your kids ssc or passwords, store encrypted notes, anonymous communication by just posting an image online somewhere).<p>Everyone should know Facebook encryption is about as good as free (or maybe most) VPN encryption. But with steganography all you need is an open source application that you can trust or a popular codec.<p>If anyone is interested I have a stalled steganography project that I&#x27;m waiting to get back to (once I finish a ASP.NET Core book) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;smchughinfo&#x2F;steganographyjr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;smchughinfo&#x2F;steganographyjr</a>. I&#x27;m making it as easy to use as possible (UWP, iOS, Android, a website, Web API, Nuget, and possibly a native app for Debian if I get the time) Most of that work, though, you get for free with .NET Standard + Xamarin but it&#x27;s still a lot of work.

maybe trump paved the way for twitter posts to become leading news, but this is hardly more than a rando on the internet speculating. whatever it takes to keep that narrative up i guess

This article specifically talks about sex workers using whatsapp and the fact that because of meta data sharing, IF a warrant comes from the government to find users associated with a certain group (such as sex workers groups) on Facebook, it indirectly brings whatsapp users into that group as well through indirect means. Interesting issue yet so many &quot;if&quot;s. The reality is that Facebook needs to make money from whatsapp at some point. If keeping end to end message encryption is important, then they are left with three equally bad options:<p># Charge for the service (whatsapp will lose 90% of its userbase in a month)<p># Show generic ads (worse value than even TV ads, because at least TV ads know a little bit about the viewers of a certain show but whatsapp has no idea)<p># Figure out a way to deliver targeted ads.

&gt;Don&#x27;t you know that our plans have your interests -- not ours -- in mind? Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations?

&quot;We don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re writing, but we know who you&#x27;re talking to! We love encryption now!&quot;

It will also make it easier for them to take your FB profile and run targeted ads on whatsapp using it.

I don&#x27;t think this is really gonna change much. Or really it&#x27;s just going from bad to bad.

Literally exactly what they said they wouldn&#x27;t do. I gotta get off Facebook stat

But don&#x27;t they already know who you are talking to ?

No surprises here.

The title seems to suggest an announcement but the article is essentially speculation. Sure, it&#x27;s likely that Facebook will exploit the mega-chatosphere for its data in the same way it currently does with each service individually (and cross service if you count account linkage). However, this article is essentially sensationalism for the sake of plugging their own privacy focused chat app.<p>I suggest the title be renamed to something less official sounding.