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Encryption Facebook

Meta Delays Encrypted Messages on Facebook and Instagram To 2023 (theguardian.com) 34

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users' messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as "simply not acceptable." The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the "frontline of child sexual abuse online" because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content -- a process known as end-to-end encryption. The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

"We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023," Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. "As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we're determined to protect people's private communications and keep people safe online." Meta already uses end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service and had been planning to extend that to its Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. It has already encrypted voice and video calls on Messenger. Announcing the privacy drive in 2019, Zuckerberg, said: "People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they've sent them to -- not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they're using."

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Meta Delays Encrypted Messages on Facebook and Instagram To 2023

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  • back door or accessory to a crime (CP) what is better to have?

    • I thought you had to have knowledge of the crime in question to be an accessory. If you don't have the knowledge since your users are exchanging encrypted messages you can't read, how can you be an accessory?
    • > back door or accessory to a crime (CP) what is better to have?

      That's not how this works. Ask AT&T.

  • by iamnotx0r ( 7683968 ) on Monday November 22, 2021 @02:33PM (#62010857)
    ...and it is always something about children.
  • We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023, ...

    Just after the U.S. midterm elections are over. We definitely want to be able to snoop people's messages through then so we can serve up the proper targeted misinformation to generate revenue and help people vote in a way that helps preserve our corporate interests. After then, we'll figure out some other reason to delay E2E encryption ... /cynical

  • Metastabook book delayed something right? Just trying to get the name straight.

  • 8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?"

    [...]

            like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles.

  • by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Monday November 22, 2021 @03:06PM (#62010947)
    It seems like for the past two decades, the main argument put out by Law Enforcement against encryption is always about pedophiles and child porn enthusiasts. Cases, such as the FBI's anti-Tor onion site operation, frequently show their go to in any cases where encryption makes it more difficult to do police work is "We should get rid of this encryption, because it could be used by child molesters."

    Everyone hates child molesters, even amongst those in prison they're viewed as scum. So they are an easy scapegoat and first stop to respond to when refusing to implement encryption, "You wouldn't want child molesters to be protected, right? Are you a child molester?"

    The fact is though that while it's possible for all sorts of undesirables to have communications protected by encryption, this represents a very tiny minority of the actual usage. Most of the things being protected are private conversations, photos, and regular web traffic.

    Curiously, it also make sit harder to monetize your conversation data/target ads at users if the messages are encrypted. So why not pull one from the government playbook and blame the existence of digital child molesters as the reason encryption can't be deployed?

    Come on, we see through this. Why couldn't you just disable encryption on any Facebook accounts where the holder is 18 years and put up a warning this conversation isn't encrypted?

    • by jonwil ( 467024 )

      It seems that terrorism is increasingly being used as an argument against security and encryption as well.

      Anytime you have people who commit mass murder (like that guy in Texas who shot up a church) the police claim they need to see the individual's history (online data, phone contents etc) to figure out if they might be a "lone wolf" terrorist or some crap.

      In the case of the texas church shooting, the guy was already dead and even if there wasn't, there was more than enough physical evidence to get a convi

  • For the children, citizen! Now climb into that boxcar.

    • Or Marxism, the soviets also made use of boxcars, but for their own citizens. If you don't know what humanity is capable of read Gulag Archipelago

      • by bsDaemon ( 87307 )

        Mussolini, originator of fascism, started out as a Marxist. His father was a well known Communist. Fascism and Socialism/Communism are collectivist ideologies that put the race/class/state/party ahead of the individual. All their crimes are similar because at their heart while the rhetoric may sound different the actions are always pretty much the same.

      • This just shows that if an extremist of either the left or right promises to bring "utopia", it's time to run the other way.

      • People didn't understand that "MAGA" was trumpese code for "utopia".

          Had "MAGA" gone through, the United States would've been on that blood soaked list of other "utopian" countries during the past century.

          "It can't happen here", just ask a Native American what he thinks about that.

  • When all other arguments fail, resort to: - racism - antisemitism - transphobia - child pr0n ...
  • by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Monday November 22, 2021 @04:50PM (#62011303) Homepage Journal

    Because, yes... the ONLY people who want to use encryption are child molesters.

    The rest of us who aren't molesters are just supposed to let you all invade our privacy.

    Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

  • needed to use the feature.

    problem solved?
  • Priti Patel, why would she care about bullying she literally has lawsuits against her right now for bullying.

    And how the f*** does encrypting messages facilitate bullying anyway, bullies don't give a fuck whether their messages are encrypted, the current state of affairs proves this 100%.

    There are likely good measures to help deal with bullying, spying on people is not one of those measures, spying on people is in of itself a psychological harm.

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