The US Govt 5 years ago: e2e encryption is for terrorists. The govt should have backdoors.
The US Govt now: Oh fuck, our back door got breached, everyone quick use e2e encryption asap!
The Australian government tried to straight up ban encryption some years ago.
I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can’t ban maths.
If I remember correctly, there’s also a law in Australia where they can force tech companies to introduce backdoors in their systems and encryption algorithms, and the company must not tell anyone about it. AFAIK they haven’t tried to actually use that power yet, but it made the (already relatively stagnant) tech market in Australia even worse. Working in tech is the main reason I left Australia for the USA - there’s just so many more opportunities and significantly higher paying jobs for software developers in Silicon Valley.
You can’t ban maths.
tell me about it; it tried that against my teacher in middle school
I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can’t ban maths.
Now laugh at banning chemistry and physics (guns and explosives and narcotics). Take a laugh at banning murder too - how do you ban every action leading to someone’s death?
and the company must not tell anyone about it
Any “must not tell” law is crap. Unless you signed some NDA knowing full well what it is about.
Any kind of “national secret disclosure” punishment when you didn’t sign anything to get that national secret is the same.
It’s an order given to a free person, not a voluntarily taken obligation.
That said, you can’t fight force with words.
Different parts of the government. Both existed then and now. There has for a long time been a substantial portion of the government, especially defense and intelligence, that rely on encrypted comms and storage.
I have never understood why electronic communications are not protected as physical mail
Oh gee, forcing companies to leave backdoors for the government might compromise security, everyone. Who’d have thunk it? 🤦
They knew, they were putting backdoors when they needed them.
Now the new administration will take half of the blame in public opinion (that’s how this works) and also half of the profits, so they won’t investigate too strictly those who’ve done such things.
But also words don’t cost anything. They can afford to say the obvious after the deed has been done.
It’s probably also good practice to assume that not all encrypted apps are created equal, too. Google’s RCS messaging, for example, says “end-to-end encrypted”, which sounds like it would be a direct and equal competitor to something like Signal. But Google regularly makes money off of your personal data. It does not behoove a company like Google to protect your data.
Start assuming every corporation is evil. At worst you lose some time getting educated on options.
End to end is end to end. Its either “the devices sign the messages with keys that never leave the the device so no 3rd party can ever compromise them” or it’s not.
Signal is a more trustworthy org, but google isn’t going to fuck around with this service to make money. They make their money off you by keeping you in the google ecosystem and data harvesting elsewhere.
google isn’t going to fuck around with this service to make money
Your honor, I would like to submit Exhibit A, Google Chrome “Enhanced Privacy”.
Google will absolutely fuck with anything that makes them money.
Thats a different tech. End to end is cut and dry how it works. If you do anything to data mine it, it’s not end to end anymore.
Only the users involved in end to end can access the data in that chat. Everyone else sees encrypted data, i.e noise. If there are any backdoors or any methods to pull data out, you can’t bill it as end to end.
Signal doesn’t harvest, use, sell meta data, Google may do that.
E2E encryption doesn’t protect from that.
Signal is orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Google in that regard.
Agreed. That still doesnt mean google is not doing E2EE for its RCS service.
Im not arguing Google is trustworthy or better than Signal. I’m arguing that E2EE has a specific meaning that most people in this thread do not appear to understand.
It could be end to end encrypted and safe on the network, but if Google is in charge of the device, what’s to say they’re not reading the message after it’s unencrypted? To be fair this would compromise signal or any other app on Android as well
That’s a different threat model that verges on “most astonishing corporate espinoage in human history and greatest threat to corporate personhood” possible for Google. It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google employees coordinating in utter secrecy to commit an unheard of crime that would be punishable by death in many circumstances.
If they have backdoored all android phones and are actively exploting them in nefarious ways not explained in their various TOS, then they are exposing themselves to ungodly amounts of legal and regulatory risks.
I expect no board of directors wants a trillion dollars of company worth to evaporate overnight, and would likely not be okay backdooring literally billions of phones from just a fiduciary standpoint.
End to end could still - especially with a company like Google - include data collection on the device. They could even “end to end” encrypt sending it to Google in the side channel. If you want to be generous, they would perform the aggregation in-device and don’t track the content verbatim, but the point stands: e2e is no guarantee of privacy. You have to also trust that the app itself isn’t recording metrics, and I absolutely do not trust Google to not do this.
They make so of their big money from profiling and ads. No way they’re not going to collect analytics. Heck, if you use the stock keyboard, that’s collecting analytics about the texts you’re typing into Signal, much less Google’s RCS.
end to end is meaningless when the app scans your content and does whatever with it
End to end matters, who has the key; you or the provider. And Google could still read your messages before they are encrypted.
You have the key, not the provider. They are explicit about this in the implementation.
They can only read the messages before encryption if they are backdooring all android phones in an act of global sabotage. Pretty high consequences for soke low stakes data.
Note that it doesn’t mean metadata is encrypted. They may not know what you sent, but they may very well know you message your mum twice a day and who your close friends are that you message often, that kinda stuff. There’s a good bit you can do with metadata about messages combined with the data they gather through other services.
Unless you’re Zoom and just blatantly lie lol
Of course our app is end-to-end encrypted! The ends being your device and our server, that is.
They do encrypt it and they likely dont send the messages unencrypted.
Likely what’s happening is they’re extracting keywords to determine what you’re talking about (namely what products you might buy) on the device itself, and then uploading those categories (again, encrypted) up to their servers for storing and selling.
This doesn’t invalidate their claim of e2ee and still lets them profit off of your data. If you want to avoid this, only install apps with open source clients.
E2EE means a 3rd party cant extract anything in the messages at all, by definition.
If they are doing the above, it’s not E2EE, and they are liable for massive legal damages.
Well yeah, to use RCS on Android, you need to use Google’s Messenger app, so they can absolutely still get your data. Source from GrapheneOS.
I don’t use RCS because I refuse to use Google’s Messenger app. Simple as.
End-to-end encryption matters if your device isn’t actively trying to sabotage your privacy.
If you run Android, Google is guilty of that.
If you run Windows in a non-enterprise environment Microsoft is guilty of that.
If you run iOS or MacOS, Apple is (very likely) guilty of that.
Like Signal?
Yes, like Signal!
Which does not only use end-to-end encryption for communication, but protects meta data as well:
Signal also uses our metadata encryption technology to protect intimate information about who is communicating with whom—we don’t know who is sending you messages, and we don’t have access to your address book or profile information. We believe that the inability to monetize encrypted data is one of the reasons that strong end-to-end encryption technology has not been widely deployed across the commercial tech industry.
Source: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
I haven’t verified that claim investigating the source code, but I’m positive others have.
I read Molly is forked from Signal. Can I message Signal users from Molly, or do all parties need Molly?
until the republicans ban them so they can find queer kids and pregnant people getting healthcare and people reading books
A good advice: start learning how to self host, specially a matrix instance.
There’s no fediverse replacement for Grindr yet? I’m honestly surprised.
There should at least be an OSS one though right? Like an OpenGrindr? Or a LibreGrindr?
All that happens under Dems, too. Stop giving them a pass.
Y’all keep hitting that downvote button. I’d like to know how many of you are ok with fascism when it’s a Dem at the helm.
Yup. The Apple-FBI encryption dispute started under Obama, as did the Snowden leak.
Neither party is particularly pro-encryption, because governments in general see encryption by the public a hurdle for their operations (i.e. you don’t need encryption if you have nothing to hide).
Encryption isn’t a partisan issue, and my understanding is that both major parties suck about equally on this issue.
It’s a wonder they’re not also trying to outlaw printing presses at this point. They openly believe that we are not entitled to private conversations.
The Snowden leaks came out when Obama was president. Obama was the one who said, “The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide”. The republicans and democrats are the same fucking people.
Only if you look at it in the most general, limited, pov. Are they the same people on corporate greed? Not all, but mostly yes. Are they the same people on encryption? Yes. Are they the same on human rights? Absolutely fucking not. If the only thing important for you is encryption, voting isn’t going to change the government’s policy decisions. However, if things other than encryption and corporate greed are important, then voting for a Republican is voting against your interests. History is filled with people who can’t see past their own fucking biases and look out for the greater interest… So you have a lot of historical company.
The republicans and democrats are the same fucking people.
In many cases, literally. From Michael Bloomberg and Liz Cheney to Donald Trump and Joe Manchin, the number of cross-overs and turn-coats who end up getting into leadership in their opponent’s parties is absolutely crazy. The Nixonian Southern Strategy did one thing brilliantly. It completely crossed the wires of the partisan voter for three generations to the benefit of the corporate oligarchs who get to play both ends against the middle.
All that happens under Dems, too
Fucking what? Which democrats are banning books and putting together lists of trans children?
And no, I’m not a fan of the DNC, I’m just not a fucking dishonest piece of shit.
Those downvoting aren’t the type of people who enjoy challenging their worldview. They won’t look at shit.
Dumb people are down voting you despite the fact that you’re 1000000% correct.
Leftists need to stop defending the Democratic party so hard, it’s making them look like neo liberals
Wait what? You know that leftists dislike Democrats, right?
Are you really not aware they are two different things?
Leftists need to stop defending the Democratic party
The joke of it is you’re either with the Democratic Party or you’re a hyper-authoritarian anti-democratic Russia/China loving Tankie. You will eat your police state and you will like it, because otherwise the Bigger Fascists will win.
