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Comment by aster0id | Hacker News Reader

Be careful with sharing this URL in your Instagram DMs. I built something similar a few weeks ago for watching Instagram reels, shared a link to it with someone on Instagram, and my account instantly got suspended because this type of stuff violates Instagram's TOS and they crack down really hard on it.

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How can that be, aren't Instagram Dms end-to-end encrypted, curious on how they find these kind of messages

They make the app that stores the plaintext at each end... they don't need to decrypt your messages across the wire to read them.

Ah I understand now, thank you. So they can actually read it just not in transit but from the app, isn't that a security violation?

A what violation?

I kid. But only sorta.

They advertise e2e as something that is to secure your messages and no one can read it including them, just got surprised when I realized they can view all the messages before transit, I never even thought that that they can do that before encryption

They control the software doing the encryption & decryption - they could ship your private keys to themselves if they truly wanted to be evil.

Who would know?

All e2e encrypted apps can do this. It's the price you pay for a completely closed ecosystem that coddles you at every turn because you're too much of a little bean to know what real security is.

Edit: this isn't a dig at you, it's a dig at how google and apple treat you

I didn't know that they are able to do this, now that I know it just makes perfect sense.

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