Chat Control is already live on Facebook Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Chat Control is already live on Facebook Messenger

15 pointssputr22 comments

I don’t use Facebook Messenger much, but I did recently to reconnect with a friend from my teenage years.

Today I woke up to the following message: “You can’t send messages for 3 days. Something you sent in a chat went against our Community Standards.” This was followed by a button linking to those standards. And yes, all my chats are locked.

So I’ve been put in “time out.” An American corporation has decided I’m not allowed to speak to my friend for 3 days (our only way to communicate—a mistake in hindsight).

And before you ask: what did I say? Most of the conversation was entirely banal. But at one point I was asked about the most memorable things from my time in politics. Among other things, I mentioned a quiet rumor about a ch#ild pros#####on ring (see, I’m self-censoring! I’m a good and obedient citizen!) in a bar frequented by the local political elite. That was last night. And no, my friend did not report me.

People believe private chats to be, well, private. They also believe that Facebook Messenger is encrypted. Neither is true.

Except that when I tell people about this, the most common response is not surprise or anger, but a kind of weary acceptance - as if the problem isn’t the censorship, but my failure to follow the rules.

I was part of the politically active youth a decade ago, fighting for free speech, net neutrality, against censorship, and against corporate power taking over and corrupting what we saw as a beautiful force for good: the internet. It seems we failed. The well-paid IT jobs turned out to be too sweet to pass up.

I guess we still have Signal. For now.

First, Chat Control refers to a proposition in the EU, which has not been accepted at this point. So no, it's not Chat Control.

> People believe private chats to be, well, private.

You have to choose an app that seems private enough. Signal is one of the few, because it can be audited easily.

> as if the problem isn’t the censorship, but my failure to follow the rules.

The problem I see is that you disagree with how Meta handles Messenger, but still use it. Chat Control or not, there is no law preventing Meta from reading your messages for moderation.

> I guess we still have Signal. For now.

Yes, and that's a good thing.

Everyone should be selfhosting a matrix server, with a guest web inbox. Then, some ppl may connect into networks if they want. Lets not forget that Signal is also a for-profit company. IMs should be like DNS, email, or IRC.

> Lets not forget that Signal is also a for-profit company.

Source? Last time I checked it was a non-profit. But that's not the point. The point is that the Signal app is open source, so you can check what it does.

Matrix is inferior to Signal.

Every company is for profit. OpenAI was a “non-profit”. “Worse” and “good enough” can be true at the same time. Selfhosting signal is inferior to selfhosting matrix [0].

[0] https://softwaremill.com/can-you-self-host-the-signal-server...

Didn't we go through this before with PGP-encrypted emails? 90+% of users are not technically competent enough to even understand, in the vaguest of terms, what you are saying. Even fewer have the time, ability and resources to do so.

Long ago this was an issue. Now with Thunderbird people can trivially PGP encrypt the body of their emails. With IRC this is done with OTR e.g. irssi-otr. I've manage to get lawyers and family members to use PGP so it can't be that hard.

Ask a teenager what a folder is. There's a good chance they'll not know what you are talking about. They can use apps and that's about it. Thunderbird? Good luck with that.

I hear you. It's about incentives. Any time a teenager can learn a method to get around content restrictions will will become a tool in their toolbox. They might reach for the Discord tool by default but when that is compromised such as recent events and governments start looking into all the DM's and voice-to-text transcripts they may reach for that old tool to prove they can not be censored or monitored. I would not expect teenagers to use it otherwise.

> First, Chat Control refers to a proposition in the EU, which has not been accepted at this point. So no, it's not Chat Control.

The EU proposition of Chat Control is the proposition to make it mandatory. Facebook has already been performing it voluntarily (as I've discovered today).

> The problem I see is that you disagree with how Meta handles Messenger, but still use it. Chat Control or not, there is no law preventing Meta from reading your messages for moderation.

Meta isn't just some random company who's decisions don't have wide and far reaching societal effects.

Moderation of private 1v1 chats only make sense in case of harassment - i.e. when one side complains. In all other cases, except with a courts decree based on legitimate suspicion of wrongdoing, it's absurd.

> Yes, and that's a good thing.

For now.

> Meta isn't just some random company who's decisions don't have wide and far reaching societal effects.

So what? There is no law saying that messages should always be e2ee, period. If you want such a law, you need to convince politicians to think about it. But that is orthogonal to Chat Control.

It is technically impossible for a large platform to implement E2EE without having a way to target one person to bypass it. True E2EE will always have to be a program external to the chat platform that handles keys out of band like OTR.

Legally it will never truly happen. Any platform saying they have E2EE is outright lying. Lavabit was an example of what happens when a large platform makes lawful intercept impossible. People keep telling me that Proton and Signal are E2EE and I will always offer them a tropical island for sale on the dark side of the moon, heavily discounted. Moxie of all people should know better.

> It is technically impossible for a large platform to implement E2EE without having a way to target one person to bypass it.

You'd have to explain what you mean here. If you mean that it's impossible to have encryption that is resistant to someone putting a gun on your face and asking for the password, then... well duh.

If someone or something else is managing keys for you, even the javascript in your client, then it can be altered by the server just for you. It's really just that simple. If you are creating and managing key trusts outside of the application then they can not tamper with them or add their own keys.

I still don't understand what you are saying. You claim that Signal is not E2EE. Please explain.

Signal is an open source mobile app that I can audit and compile myself. How is it "obviously not E2EE"?

Open source chat and open source AI just mean that the code you are looking at does not have an obvious back door. That has no bearing on run-time use and monkey-patching. As for Signal not being E2EE I already explained. I don't play the contrarian game so you will have to do your own research.

> As for Signal not being E2EE I already explained.

Either you have not, or it was wrong. It's not clear because there were a bunch of mixed up things (JavaScript has nothing to do with Signal, so I assume you were talking about the Proton web pages, and I would agree there).

> I don't play the contrarian game so you will have to do your own research.

That's not how it works: you say Signal is not E2EE, you prove it. I am convinced that it is, so from my point of view, you don't understand how it works. The only way I can help you understand is if you explain what you believe is wrong there. Google won't tell me that.

I don't know about social media companies, but all web forums will 'moderate' 1v1 chats because of spam controls.

Zuck didn't build a social network.

Facebook's real product isn't connecting people; it's redefining what human connection means. They proved emotional states transfer via algorithmic contagion¹, then industrialized it.

Graph Search could find anyone based on intimate details, but felt too predatory. So they embedded the same targeting into every interaction; News Feed, Groups, PYMK-recommendations. Same data harvesting, and behavioral influence with an invisible delivery. The brilliance was introducing Groups. It felt like organic community building, and it keeps enough people on Facebook for them to sell ads.

Two generations now think algorithmic feeds and sharing memes counts as socializing. Why predict and connect when you can nudge and influence?

He weaponized culture at scale.

¹ https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

I thought that Facebook Messenger was end-to-end encrypted for personal one-on-one chats? That's also the reason why Facebook asks you to set a PIN to retrieve your chats on other devices. Only group chats are not E2EE. So yes, this looks like a chat control-like feature where the scanning is done on the client and not on Facebook's servers.

Whatsapp is e2ee with client reporting

I've gotten into heated conversations with family members because they insist on only using Facebook Messenger and can't understand why I don't want to be on that platform

> People believe private chats to be, well, private. They also believe that Facebook Messenger is encrypted.

Do people really believe this?

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