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Comment by xfour | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I can see the business salivating over this. Integrate tracking into WhatsApp, you can now more easily graph who people talk to and use that for their FB and IG accounts, and probably destroy the e2e encryption while they're at it. Therefore re-monitizing that section of their userbase.

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It's easy to grab your pitchfork when seeing just a headline, but I'm quoting the article verbatim here:

> Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered all of the apps to incorporate end-to-end encryption, the people said, a significant step that protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation.

And Zuckerberg and FB have been true to their word every step of the way. I see the backpedaling now, “Well you see congressman, I ordered it but when we dug in deeper, it would have a material impact on revenue, so we were forced due to our fiduciary duty to remove it.” And just happened to not tell anyone until it came out via whistleblower or some other means.

If there is someone who will push Facebook to abandon end to end encryption, it will just as soon be Congress, facing pressure form law-enforcement, with the implicit help of the NYTimes, who will no doubt be happy to feed the Anti-Facebook hysteria with classics such as "Facebook is allowing child pornography to be sent through it's newly unified infrastructure".

You’re right I didn’t stop to think of the children. And there you go, now we have the encryption broken and the National security letters as the reason they were forced to do so. It’s just as many of the comments above are saying you’re really just making this new shared infrastructure an enourmous target.

I highly doubt Messenger will have end-to-end encryption, especially that they have to display those messages on Facebook web.

WhatsApp's UX is pretty darn good and would be copied for Messenger. You sign-in on the web from your phone and then messages are proxied through it.

Also an option to enable web E2E with a password-protected key stored on FB's servers is still pretty darn good.

Yes but Whatsapp does not have a real web client unlike Messenger, web.whatsapp.com is just reading data from your phone.

People are using both Messenger & Facebook web to send messages, they will have to break that somewhere for end-to-end.

It just means that two (or n) keys will need to be able to decrypt the message database. The web client doesn't have to behave any differently than the native client.

If Facebook is storing your encrypted message database on their servers then the problem gets significantly easier.

Messenger already has an encrypted mode on devices, though I agree default encryption seems unlikely.

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