A friend of mine worked at meta and said they already had a fullscale set of systems to mass export data to governments based on certain indicators (eg keywords) in response to subpoenas. Perhaps that’s obvious, but the mechanism for proper channels is there, I doubt end-to-end encryption blocks that.

Anything that goes from a company to a government or particular that discloses sensitive data is illegal and should go through a judge permission. Otherwise it is a crime. These things must be supervised by a judge.

Otherwise innocent people, disidents or political rivals could just be in danger.

Not a good thing.

> I doubt end-to-end encryption blocks that.

Isn't it supposed to?

I never saw this substantiated, but I heard that they had on-device systems that they used in emergencies for stuff that was particularly bad + easy to scan for. The time I heard of it being deployed was to prevent the spread of the Christchurch shooting video.

What's to stop them from having hooks in their app that can bundle up all the decrypted messages, re-encrypt, and phone home? Certainly it wouldn't be default behavior, but its possible and would allow them to answer warrants.

It's a good point. But someone would eventually see it in the dev tools and Meta's credibility would be shot forever.

It's an open question if that impacts their bottom line at all.

Agreed. I think their bottom line probably is built off of how it would affect their user base. My hunch is given the immensity of the user base, it wouldn't cause enough of a significant exodus for Meta to care either way. But that's speculation, not sure if that can be backed up with evidence from past events.

A keyword search is simple enough it can be done client side, before any encryption (and/or after decryption).

Oh, good point.

WhatsApp wording is usually very specific about e2e when you send a message from you to your contact. Nothing about eg all this also being dumped on FB servers in plaintext.

This wouldn't be an outright lie - it may well be e2ee but just also shared around.

That would be a lie from the perspective of a court since it very clearly does not fit their description of the service. In cases like that, courts tend to give leeway to the argument that they promised what a reasonable person would conclude from the product advertisement.

What would be more interesting would be if they had a way to signal their app to do a search locally and report a match. That would still be E2E but might be enough that they would be able to defend a lawsuit.

> That would be a lie from the perspective of a court since it very clearly does not fit their description of the service.

I don't know. They promise a particular aspect of privacy and presumably deliver on it. They don't promise absolute privacy - that's my whole point.

I think given the exact wording of what they promise, I can't reasonably expect that my conversations are private only between me and the recipient.

This is what they said and it very clearly excludes the scenario in question:

> The extra layer of security provided by end-to-end encryption means that the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receiver’s device. This means that nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said, unless you choose to report a message to us.

With what little FANG legalese I know, this IMHO covers Al ranges of nasty behaviour.

But of course we won't know either way until it's tried in court.

> are protected from the moment they leave your device

Eh plenty of wiggle room here

Not if you don't chop the quote like a creationist. The next sentence rules out any sort of creative games like “we send it to the receiver which decrypts it and bounces a copy back”:

> This means that nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said, unless you choose to report a message to us.

If they were playing games and got sued, I'd be quite surprised if they didn't get laughed out of court for claiming that “nobody” actually meant “the FBI”.

Surely if it is actually end-to-end, there's no data to send? I just wouldn't trust Meta to do that.

There are different definitions of “end” in “end-to-end”

* One being you communicate from your device to the servers securely; in that case, you can do keyword matching. If you try anything like that, a few engineers will insist Meta clarifies that is not the intended meaning of that word, Alec Muffet will probably be the loudest.

* The other, device to device, would indeed prevent Meta from doing data collection—unless they apply the keyword detection on your device directly. But that also means the list of keywords would be accessible by any user (unless you use a bloom filter, where it could be more challenging to guess), and that’s not something the cops are found about. You’d also have to let your own device send the message “Phone 1234 used the banned word 5678,” which criminals would learn to block.

So yeah, in principle, end-to-end would make it hard to do well. I‘d be really surprised if Meta got away from something that egregious, though: there are still people internally who know that government power can be abused and would not let people lie about how safe the tool is.