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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

I wish they didn't do this.

They already have an end-to-end encrypted messaging application: it's called WhatsApp. I have seen so many people (and have myself been) bitten by WhatsApp's E2E implementation: messages lost because your phone was barely online and you "read" the message but didn't fully receive it, leaving you to awkwardly ask people to re-send things. Plus the constant need to backup your messages because if you don't you can lose access to them forever. Plenty of my family have lost messages/images that were sent to them and were important to them.

I'd rather not deal with this. Sometimes I want all my messages to be stored on a big company's servers. They should at least give people the option to choose.

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Apparently in FB Messenger, conversations will still be stored in the cloud, albeit encrypted:

> Messenger has always allowed clients to operate off of a small stored local cache, relying on a server-side database for their message history. Neither WhatsApp nor Secret Conversations operated in this manner, and we didn’t want all users to have to rely on a device-side storage system. Instead, we designed an entirely new encrypted storage system called Labyrinth, with ciphertexts uploaded to our servers and loaded on-demand by clients, while operating in a multi-device manner and supporting key rotation when clients are removed.

The big company does not want to store your messages, as they need to deal with Chinese, Turkish, Saudis and other people whose messages someone wants to read. If there is “nothing to read” (let’s forget about metadata) then governments and such should abuse the system less.

Doesn't matter, if they want to keep operating in such countries, they've got several options to choose from, amongst providing a backdoor or disabling E2EE.

Sometimes I feel like these are the “plastic-free bag” solution[0] designed to make the market embrace the “tried and true” old way.

[0] There was this chip bag from a major chip manufacturer and it proudly claimed the bag was plastic free (might even have been compostable), but it was the thinnest, loudest, crinkliest bag you’d ever heard. It seemed like the chip manufacturer board meeting went like this: “The people want us to cut out plastic! For the environment or something. Don’t they know how much easier and more profitable plastic bags are?? You know what? If they want plastic-free we’ll give them plastic-free... We’ll make them regret even asking...”

That bag didn’t last long before it vanished never to be seen again.

Honestly, this seems like the sort of thing that they just didn't consider when testing. Maybe they even saw some 'Bag is unusually loud' notes and thought 'How bad could it possibly be?' and greenlit it. Feels more like incompetent bureaucracy (which I'm sure we all understand) than something malicious.

Much more likely they had a strict time limit (internally or externally imposed) on what they considered biodegradable. If you make it stronger but thinner, bacteria can break it up much faster which leads to faster breakdown. By comparison the bag being loud seems pretty irrelevant if it's just not possible to make a thicker bag degrade faster.

Also, many biodegradable plastics are more brittle than more common plastics. They only way to keep the bag flexible in that case is to make it thinner.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I’m not trying to prove that there was malice in the case of the chip bag, I’m just using it as a way to explain the tactic.

> We are beginning to upgrade people’s personal conversations on Messenger to use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default

The first line of the article suggests that it's an option

> They should at least give people the option to choose.

Messenger does. You can have a normal chat and a private, end-to-end encrypted chat at the same time with the same person, both completely separate.

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