They have been on the side of encryption since the beginning really.

I think had WhatsApp not added E2EE in 2014, Encryption wouldn't be that wide spread today.

Wasn't that right before WhatsApp was bought though? From what I remember they made an effort to implement E2EE before Facebook had any say in it.

Nope, it was implemented after purchase. It's been (optional) in messenger too for almost as long.

Facebook Messenger has had (opt in) E2EE since 2017 I believe.

They're starting to enable it by default recently

2014 was also the year Let's Encrypt was founded.

Truly game changing.

Curious how it benefits Meta

They’ve been fighting it since adding e2e encryption to their products, but people don’t know that

They partly don't know that because Signal likes to throw WhatsApp under the bus any chance they get, rather than treating them as an ally; I wish Signal would redirect their efforts to choosing new targets, whether in their current app or in a new different product, taking on the ilk of Snapchat/Telegram or even Discord.

Where did Signal do that? Moxie was contracted by fb back then to help implement the signal protocol so I’m not sware of them dunking on whatsapp

You must not be paying much attention, then? ;P / :(

https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/05/07/how-sign...

> Signal’s idea was to get users to abandon WhatsApp and switch to Signal, an instant messaging service run by a non-profit foundation, which has proven its commitment to protecting the privacy of its users and that is seeing significant take up, especially after the latest changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policies.

This whole ordeal was doubly-dishonest, as not only were they running ads against one product line (Instagram) with the specific goal of getting people to switch away from a different one (WhatsApp), but the entire thing was just FUD designed to attack Facebook for going out of their way to build something that actually did honor end-to-end encrypted goals: companies wanted to be able to do Facebook Messenger -like company-to-user chat stuff, and so Facebook wanted to provide a way--specifically for companies--to use a portal to access a "hosted" WhatsApp client.

But like, that would mean that Facebook would, for just these specific chats with business accounts, potentially (if the company was using this service) be able to read those messages, so they had to adjust their privacy policy. In some cases, this didn't even involve removing text, but was just a matter of moving some text... but Signal didn't care much about accuracy: they were stoking the flames every way they could and in the process frankly harmed their own mission because a ton of people ended up going in the exact opposite direction, moving to apps like Telegram.

Here is a comment I had left at the time of this specific particularly-big incident going down, which has then a link to another comment I'd left with more detail on this (as my memory is fading on this stuff) including quotes from both Facebook representatives and their documentation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26801760

Signal is a non-profit whose mission should be to get people to move to encrypted technologies whether or not that decision involves Signal and they should be trying to work with Facebook on the narrative surrounding WhatsApp, not throwing them under the bus any chance they have to get some publicity for Signal. Here's the real question: have you ever seen them publicly go after Snapchat, or Telegram? As far as I can tell--not just from memory, but from doing some searches on the topic--the answer seems to be "no": they go after WhatsApp, because that product is the closest to being a direct competitor to Signal.

(That said, I also want to be clear: the actual part where Facebook didn't allow them to run the ads and the feud there is also not good... but not only are the morals there a bit more murky, it makes both sides look shitty to be sitting around in some epic fight over their market, and all the meanwhile the benefactors were the apps other than Signal and WhatsApp, and Signal should be sticking to their mission and teaming up there to help clarify to prevent those kinds of losses.)

As of something like 2015 they allowed you to add your PGP public key to your profile to get encrypted notification messages. They are pretty much encryption hipsters.

They're just defending their (enormous) market share. I don't expect they are doing it from the goodness of their heart.

I'm not that cynical. They could just drop E2EE from their product and call it a day. It wouldn't make much of a difference for them.

i think to expect a multi-billion dollar organisation to make consequential decisions like this based on anything other than cold calculation is naive at best and enormously stupid at the very worst.

On the other hand, it's not really end to end encrypted. They've inserted a sort of man-in-the-end bit so they can check your content in the app and send out information about the content out-of-band. I don't know if they do this for advertising purposes, but I know they do image recognition to detect for example, specific types of pornography.