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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

F. Scott Fitzgerald's test of top-tier intelligence -

> Holding two opposing views in the mind means accepting two contradictory ideas at the same time without needing to pick one side or rush to a simple answer

I continue to use Apple products because they are top class even though everytime I think of Tim Cook in the Oval Office presenting the gold plaque to the current president, it makes me wanna puke. World isnt black or white.

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The reason I mentioned it is because Google seems to have a strange aversion to E2EE. Apple has added the option to iCloud but Google only has one consumer facing E2EE product, Google messages. A password manager is the most obviously important place to use it. I can't name another password manager that isn't.

How many customers are using Google Password Manager? How much revenue does it generate? What would it cost to add E2EE? How would it affect the UX? How much revenue would it generate? What projects would have to be de-prioritized to fund this work?

I agree, a password manager without E2EE is unusable in my eyes. However, I can also understand the institutional reasons this might be the case. I don't think it reflects an organizational aversion to E2EE.

Google Password Manager does in fact have E2EE. It's quite straightforward to enable. Your interlocutor is complaining that it's not the default, which I'm quite sure is a deliberate decision made on the grounds that the typical user, the one for whom the default matters because they won't tweak their settings, needs workable account recovery more than they need defense against the specific kinds of security threats that make E2EE relevant.

LastPass, designed for regular users and one of the most popular password managers, had a breach of user vaults. If they hadn't implemented E2EE then it would have been more devastating than it was (crypto wallets were found from vaults with weak master passwords).

Google's security record at avoiding that kind of breach is just about the best in the industry, and their system that handles custody of password manager secrets is designed to withstand even a compromise of their production infrastructure (https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/SecurityofPasskeysin...). I would advise almost all users to worry more about getting locked out of their password database than about that. Of course, I would also advise almost all users not to self-custody cryptocurrency.

Your link is about them using E2EE not that they can be as secure as E2EE for users without it. Users would lose their passkeys if they lost all secrets and devices. Google couldn't recover them.

They can still and should still continue using great security practices while protecting E2EE data.

>Of course, I would also advise almost all users not to self-custody cryptocurrency.

There's no point in crypto if you're not holding your own keys. It's the antithesis of cryptocurrency. People can have highly secure self custody wallets on a modern iPhone or Pixel. And their seeds would have been safe if LastPass didn't have terrible security or they used long passphrases.

I'm pretty sure I've seen it sometimes in video calls. But it might only be two-way conversations?

That was my bad on the complete statement. If I could still edit I would say "that I know of".

Why are we citing novelists for appeals to authority on something like intelligence. I thought this might be a figure on developmental psychology to give value to your comment, but it's not even that. Should I be citing George Orwell's doublethink to counter you?

Ah, Google must be very intelligent indeed, then.

That must be the most convenient excuse I have seen to avoid taking responsibility.

"I know the raw materials for these clothes come from slavery, but hey, what can I do ? They're the softest."

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