It was for plausible deniability because of regulatory scrutiny. Regulator's dead now, so now there's no downside and only upsides to spying on your users.

They never did this for user privacy, and yes I think you're spot on. This was just to remove liability.

Now it just costs them the data and development cost to maintain. Any remaining problems they'll throw some crappy AI moderator at to fix.

Not hard to be right about this when you worked there at the time ;)

> no downside

That is not the view their legal department takes, I guarantee it. Congress ain't gonna keep its composition indefinitely.

Palantir

i am guessing that they just dont really need to pretend to care anymore. e2e messaging was a big marketing push, not ever an ideological thing. i assume they no longer believe the marketing benefits outweigh the downsides.

Probably Whatsapp is next, if it isn't quietly already.

I doubt it, E2E isba huge part of Whatsapp's selling point considering it's exclusively a messaging app. Instagram is primarily a social app with messaging features.

Normal people don't choose a messaging app based on E2EE but based on whether their friends use it.

> Probably Whatsapp is next, if it isn't quietly already.

And I will be pushing to remove WhatsApp if that’s the case.

Because they realized they need the data for AI

PR. They wanted to seem like the good guys, but they get your messages through backdoors like the automatic backup.

You're thinking of Apple. WhatsApp backups are not stored by Meta. Apple is the company that breaks their "end-to-end" encryption by backing up the encryption keys to their own servers.

You can opt-in to encrypting those backups so Apple have no access.

Yes. I believe a small percentage of Apple users do this. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent Apple from reading your messages from the backups of the vast majority of people you correspond with.