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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

This is DMs, most people don't think of those as private, and it's unreasonable to tell people to treat DMs as public. By the same logic email, SMS, voicemail and all "essentially public".

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To the police they are. Just because everyone is wrong at the same time doesn't make them less wrong.

The key going forward is to use chinese messaging services that are not beholden to US law enforcement.

Ah yes, because giving the same information to the Chinese government who don't even need a warrant to access the data is better.

The 国家安全部 isn't going to be harassing a 17 year old for a miscarriage; they neither care nor have the capability to inflict any pain on you.

If that 17 year old becomes a 30 year old with access to something sensitive the adversary wants, then the adversary might harass/blackmail that 30 year old with what they did when they were 17 years old.

Let's hope the Supreme Court will have come to its senses by then.

(Although I agree that the premise in a broader sense of trusting a Chinese company over an American one is flawed.)

... so they can blackmail some folks to make them turn over corporate secrets, facilitate money laundering, or otherwise act as spies.

Maybe still safer than a US company having the data, but not great.

> it's unreasonable to tell people to treat DMs as public

No, it's not. People should treat unencrypted centralized service DMs as public.

TFA is the proof.

Not if you self-host and/or use (actual) E2E.

Self-host Facebook? What sorcery is this?

Facebook DMs are public. Zuck can be personally beating his meat to your nudes - as can every other Facebook engineer.

Any other belief regarding the privacy of them is flawed and incorrect.

I haven't worked at Facebook, but I'd be surprised if this were true. Other large companies have audit logs of employee access to user data that are actively monitored; accessing information of users without a paper trail of justification will get you fired.

While this was true in the early days, there have been audit controls in place for a long time now. FB System Abuse == you're fired.

And yes, it's well known that Zuck did abuse God-mode back in the day.

How do we know Zuck isn't still exempt from auditing?

Because FB corp gossip leaks like a sieve.

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