Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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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?
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.
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
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