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Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I thought messenger was end-to-end encrypted, at least according to Facebook. How were they able to hand over the chat logs? The messages should be encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with user's password, which Facebook doesn't store.
What am I missing?
You’re not telling me Facebook LIED are you? No way I wouldn’t believe it /s
Actually that page suggests that they can't access it. They'd never passed the security on it if that page was lying and they don't encrypt it. Clearly there must be some kind of mechanism they can use to decrypt it for law enforcement. The technicals of that are what I was actually interested in from my original comment.
EDIT: Oh my God I just figured it out. It's not enabled by default. You have to explicitly turn it on per conversation. That's terrible
Even if you turn it on, they control the end points, so it's not really any more secured.
You're missing the fact that they lied to get users
It's not enabled by default
And on the official app it isn't called end to end encryption or even a setting toggle. It's called secret chat and clicking on it opens a chat from the original chat. The only difference I see is a little lock icon where an emoji usually is.
Sounds like Telegram, smh
wait, what ? can you elaborate, since I use telegram on daily bases
@linux_user_6967 @Goun Telegram's end-to-end encryption isn't enabled by default. You have to specifically choose to start an encrypted chat. Assuming you trust MTProto though, there's no indication they're otherwise implemented poorly.
Presumably they maintain full access because they control both ends. The encrypted part would stop others intercepting messages. At least that's how I've always read it
Edit: I'm wrong, end to end does exclude even the app provider from seeing messages. So yeah, either not enabled or they lied
To add to other replies, proprietary apps like messenger can also have backdoor access to your messenger app, where the messages are stored decrypted. I.e. maliciously taking the chat history from either ends of the end-to-end encryption.
End2End encryption is mostly a PR stunt. In practice it's not hard to go around it. For example:
It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/