Instagram Encrypted Messaging Ends on Friday, May 8

"In March, a spokesperson for Meta told The Guardian that the decision to abandon encryption was due to low uptake. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," the spokesperson said."

I wonder what it's like being a spokesperson for a company (or administration) where everyone including yourself knows your statements are misleading at best.

It feels absurd to have seen E2EE fought for and considered table stakes by many users, especially the technically-oriented, now rolled back a short time later by these companies who never really cared about privacy to begin with and clearly don't expect any backlash.

It also feels like the wide-scale desperate adoption of AI has weakened claims about the essential nature of privacy, now that everyone has demonstrated that they are happy to feed their innermost thoughts, secrets, personal conflicts, code, medical records, legal documents, etc. into cloud AI platforms.

I do not think any person would freely choose unencrypted messaging.

There is no reason for unencrypted messaging.

This is a fundamental market failure.

It is only through bundling these messaging services with other services + platform dominance that unencrypted messaging still lives.

Everything Meta has built is antithetical to privacy. I’m surprised this feature existed at all.

This might not be obvious to some, like it wasn't to me, but Instagram chat history is used for profiling. I noticed when I chatted with someone about something on Instagram, and instantly reels with the subject of our discussion started appearing in my feed.

What’s the endgame here?

- just better ad targeting? (lol if so)

- policing accounts for various possible infractions?

- training data for ML models?

Will the messages be used as training data now?