I am in a brief period between nappy changes for the toddler, so I will have to make this really concise because that situation could change at any moment so I’ll try a bullet-point-list format:
- 2013-16, I worked at Facebook, first on Security Infrastructure and latterly on Messenger
- Whilst there, in my first few months, the Snowden revelations leak
- Everyone — literally, all the platforms — saw this concrete government behaviour as an concerted assault upon online personal privacy.
- Then, as now, some people will be cynical about “big tech cares about privacy?” but it’s true[1].
- 2015, and I launched and led the project which would become Messenger Secret Conversations
- 2016, it shipped, and I quit because exhaustion & Facebook’s attempts to get into China
- 2019, Facebook announces a project to unify and end-to-end encrypt all messaging content across multiple properties
- 2021, FB/Meta post an update on progress, and the press paint this as a delay, because ElnoTwitter does not yet exist to provide a counterexample of what happens when you rush encryption into production
So where are we now?
As far as I am aware the Messenger Encryption features are all being enabled and deployed piecemeal, for instance in voice and video calls, and in places where people are particularly at risk.
And the UK Government? They are doing this:
Let’s consider this in context:
Facebook as a platform is “dead” to kids, because (apart from using it to log into a few games) they are all on Tiktok instead. There is already encryption in WhatsApp and it’s not going to be removed. Messenger is largely used by adults, and adults are assumed able to use “reporting” mechanisms to deal with abuse. In the meantime: an entire other platform (Twitter) has developed and its own launched end-to-end encryption — which we’ll graciously assume will improve over time — and there are so many other E2EE apps that India has started banning them en-masse, including Matrix and Briar.
And yet the UK Government are still obsessed with Messenger?
There’s more than a hint of Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick in this; deployment of E2EE for Facebook has taken so long that new competition has arisen and E2EE has normalised in this space, but Tugendhat — and more importantly, his office peers — are bent upon trying to “send a message”[2] by taking Zuckerberg (or: Clegg?) down.
Please: Get over it, people. The market has already shifted, and the symbolic exercise of authority you were attempting to exercise in 2019, is meaningless if done today.
[1] My preferred metaphor: a shepherd who does not tend to their sheep, is a bad shepherd. Yes, people will rail against being compared to “sheep”, but at least they are cared for in return for being part of the flock and gaining the advantages of that.
[2] Pun unintended, but apt.
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