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Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

> The apps will be integrated, he said, and messages sent through

> them encrypted end-to-end, so that even Facebook cannot read them.

Why do I have difficulty believing that? Maybe Zukerberg meant Facebook would always be one end of the end-to-end, and the reporter _assumed_ that Facebook cannot read the messages.

Sorry to be skeptical about this. But I just am.

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I suspect they were just paraphrasing Zuckerberg's blog post[1]:

> Encryption. People's private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone -- including us -- from seeing what people share on our services.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-foc...

E2E doesn't actually matter that much in the end; it's far more interesting to advertisers (and therefore valuable to Facebook) to know who you're talking to than to know what you said. Three-letter agencies know this too - scanning encrypted traffic for keywords is going to get them a lot more chaff than wheat, but spotting that five suspected criminals/subversives/journalists (delete as appropriate to your political tastes...) are having an ongoing conversation is almost pure wheat in that it tells them to expend effort on finding out whether they're making nefarious plans or just sharing cat macros.

Wait, Mark Zuckerberg decided to use the term E2E but actually change it's real meaning to complete opposite?

That's some 1984 crap right there.

E2E with "Facebook being one end" essentially means normal SSL!

No, that's something that happened only in DannyB2's mind (I was confused for a moment because DannyB is usually reasonable, the 2 has sure changed him).

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