alt Hacker NewsSo basically their marketing-department is abusing a security term in order to sound good, as opposed to a software flaw.
They're claiming "end to end" encryption, which usually implies the service is unable to spy on individual users that are communicating to one-another over an individualized channel.
However in this case there are no other users, and their server is one of the "ends" doing the communicating, which is... perhaps not a literal contradiction in terms, but certainly breaking the spirit of the phrase.
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> However in this case there are no other users, and their server is one of the "ends" doing the communicating, which is... perhaps not a literal contradiction in terms, but certainly breaking the spirit of the phrase.
Am I understanding correctly that the other end of this is a rear end?
> They're claiming "end to end" encryption, which usually implies the service is unable to spy on individual users that are communicating to one-another over an individualized channel.
It doesn't "imply", it outright states that. Their server isn't the end, it's the middle. They're not "breaking the spirit" or something, what they are doing is called lying.
While they’re taking one “end” much less literally than usual, they are taking the other “end” much more literally…
This is exactly what E2EE means. I used to work at a bank, and our data was E2EE, and we had to certify that it was E2EE - from the person paying, through the networks, through the DNS and Load balancers, until it got to the servers. Only at the servers could it be unencrypted and a (authoried) human could look at it.
Of course, only authorized users could see the data, but that was a different compliance line item.
This is an incredibly common misuse of the term e2ee. I think at this point we need a new word because you have a coin flip's chance of actually getting what you think when a company describes their product this way.