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2/ No exaggeration about “extremism” here, for instance this is today’s blogpost from @matrixdotorg regarding the proposal, and frankly I am horrified in multiple dimensions that they could propose any of this, for the following reasons:
3/ In reverse order: THE WHOLE POINT of an end-to-end encrypted environment is that “your data” is locked up on:
– your phone
– other participants’ phones
– and nowhere else
NOBODY is holding your data hostage, other than it’s on your phone — where you can save/backup, etc.
4/ Given increasing importance/use of “disappearing messages” & so forth, it’s also arguable that increasingly data is meant to expire rather than persist, and having the data exist within a single app with a single policy regarding that, helps people reason about threat models
5/ This is also known as the “…let’s swap to using Snapchat so we can send each other pictures of ourselves in the nude and can be a bit more confident that (a) images won’t persist, plus (b) I’ll know if you cheat / take a screenshot” -effect.
People want stuff like this.
6/ In short: people want value propositions and differentiation of application features as SOLUTIONS for their WANTS…
But the #interoperability crowd are people who want “one chat client to rule over all chat networks”.
7/ In fairness: there was a time when that worked, but it’s gone. The point is no longer for Alice to send messages to Bob; instead messaging facilities are a given, and it’s features like disappearing photos, or payments, or GIFs and Emoji, or Filters, which offer platform value
8/ So when @matrixdotorg talk about “walled gardens”, since no data is locked-up in E2E, what they’re actually talking about is “user engagement”.
Summary: “We think too many people are using <big platform> rather than <something else>.”
That’s just… envy & hubris.
9/ When @matrixdotorg say:
“we could flag to the user that their conversation is insecure …. Honestly, this is something communication apps (including Matrix-based ones!) should be doing anyway”
I disagree, as WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING IS MAKING THE CONVERSATION MORE SECURE:
10/ When @matrixdotorg say:
“such a bridge has to re-encrypt…breaking the end-to-end encryption guarantee…We could run the bridge somewhere relatively safe – e.g. the user’s client…[or spread] them around the internet”
You must ask: what are they trying to achieve, and why?
11/ And then you read @matrixdotorg writing:
“The gatekeeper could switch to a decentralised end-to-end encrypted protocol like Matrix to preserve end-to-end encryption throughout”
…and then you understand where their interest lies.
12/
— AND THE SAD THING IS —
I am a fan of Matrix, and @BriarApp and @r2refresh and a huge number of distributed security applications.
13/ But when they, out of hubris, are willing to weaken the security of billions of people in order to achieve some degree of growth — by painting such as a necessary step against non-existent “walled gardens of data” — they’ve jumped the shark.
14/ More background at this blogpost:
Originally tweeted by Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) on 2022/03/26.
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