Facebook offers end-to-end encrypted chat – if you find the right setting Facebook is rolling out end-to-end encryption for its messaging service to bring it in line with competitors, including its own WhatsApp. But as ever with Facebook, there's a catch: you'll have to actively select the encrypted version each time, and the service will be limited to a single device. You also won't be able to use …
In the UK and co we can whinge about security and crack on. In some parts of the world, what you say can get you deaded - terminally, with extreme prejudice.
We can take the piss and make snide remarks about secure transmissions but for those on the (very) sharp end this is more than a debate: it's the difference between life and a very painful, messy death.
Snigger if you dare.
Based on what you said, what makes facebook a good choice for this?
Privacy includes hiding who you spoke to and when, or at least having them be deniable. Even if Facebook really are encrypting the content end-to-end, the side-channels are going to leak like a sieve.
Next, your cryptoanarchist musings don't really pan out in reality. Privacy can be achieved though the low-tech means of meeting a friend in the park.
Far more often people are persecuted (or killed), for what they accidentally or defiantly say in public. Including on facebook.
Drinking a few Singha and posting that the king of Thailand a geriatric dog fcuker for example.
More likely some poor sod in China asking a family member for monetary help as conditions and pay have both gone down in the scummy sweat house they're working in or a North Korean asking the same as the military has taken his families crops again.
But shouldn't Zuck have saved this for April first?
Covert and Face Book in the same sentence cause me to have the same affliction as yourself, LOL, ROFL.
Facebook have to engage in "privacy washing".
Even the technology ignorant understand at some level that Facebook is a privacy nightmare.
However, if Facebook do paradoxical things such as operating a hidden service on Tor (facebookcorewwwi.onion) the media will publish their brand along side pro-privacy stuff. They just want their name associated with encryption like Apple.
Opt-in encryption is also really safe because Facebook will know from their stats that people never change the defaults EVER.
Surely the button is mis-labled? It should say :
"[x] Consent to wiretap my conversation".
Because in effect, by putting in such a crapply implemented feature, it lets Facebook obtain consent to wiretap your conversations. You *failed* to select the privacy option, so you *consented* to let us record your conversation and share it with anyone on the planet who will pay us for your private data.
And few people will select it, because its a subset of the normal messaging features, and because it would flag you for surveillance. Why is this person and their associate using privacy mode? That's an association we need to spy on with our warrantless surveillance.
I don't know Open Whisper Systems and have no reason to trust their products, I know Facebook and I certainly wouldn't trust theirs.
Both companies recognize they need to offer a secure form of messaging, but it also goes against their business models and incurs the displeasure of the US authorities, who are determined to gather as much data as possible by whatever means necessary.
.. so they bullshit, as usual. No change there, then, and yet another argument to avoid them like the plague.
Two things:-
One is metadata, which cannot be hidden unless you have an 'onion' layering system involving intermediate parties which encrypts the metadata as it goes up the tree, then has to be decoded to find out who the endpoint parties are. Those intermediate parties? Hmm, it's not your grandma, that's for sure.
Two is how do you start a conversation? Who has the key to enable the conversation to to take place directly between UserA and UserB with Facebook handling the initial exchange? If it's Facebook then there's an element of lets pretend scenario where Facebook could hack the full conversation. If UserA rings UserB (by telephone) and they use a key that they agree upon then that's ok, but this defeats the impromptu advantages of such a service.
So now everyone is using the same protocol from some US firm, which boffins assure you it is safe because the designer is such a great bloke. Sounds like a plan! We can trust the us and its organisations, right? It's not as if they've backdoored their secure protocols and standards before, right?
that this feature will be available in app only. The very same app that requests all possible access privileges known, tracks your location, offers you friends based on places you frequently visit and suspected in using microphone to listen conversations.
That's what you call privacy facebook style.
And by the way what exactly stops that same app to send everything to mothership anyway ?
>I don't anyone who would even be slightly interested in what I've go to say.
Now perhaps, but what happens when your government gets aggressive towards you because of a policy not yet implemented and no one has an infrastructure which supports privacy?
What happens when "if you're not for us you're for the terrorists" becomes an active policy?
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