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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? Um Mark here, you can tell from the background a little bit of a different vibe. We work in downtown Montreal down here for the day for some meetings. Um He's a little busy. Hopefully a is coming through well, real quick.
Uh There was a lot of stuff in the news the last couple of days about um Facebook, um specifically the whatsapp founders and the Instagram founders circling back up because the two Instagram founders have decided to leave and the whatsapp founders that we left last year, really interesting article of giving an insight into some of the leadership, but something that popped up on the security and privacy radar that I thought was a really important example and that was around end to end encryption.
Now whatsapp after they got a they got acquired from or by Facebook shortly after that acquisition, whatsapp deployed end to end encryption for basically everybody on the platform. And what that means is your device to somebody else's device, the traffic and the chat message is encrypted all the way through.
That means even though it passes through different servers, nobody can actually see the content of that communication. What it means is that you get the ability for private communications and only people can intercept, get encrypted packets. But they can see that communication occurred. So they didn't know that you and I spoke for how long, but they don't know the contents of that communication and why this popped up.
Why this is important is it popped up in sort of the scandal within the internal machinations of Facebook trying to monetize whatsapp because they couldn't push ads directly into the chats because those chats were end to end encrypted. And I think that's a really important fact, a really important thing to highlight is that because of the security because of that safety, that system is secured by design, it's private by default.
And that's a huge advantage. The only people who get access to those messages are those who have the devices. So if you have my phone or your phone, you can access those same thing goes for group chat. It just scales up. It's everybody within that group can see those end to end encrypted messages.
You can't see them on the server. And that's a really interesting way of designing a system. It's a very secure way of designing system. There are others that are similar to it. IMessage is end to end encrypted as long as you don't have icloud backups turned on.
There's a number of other services like signal, I believe Telegram as Well, the eff publishes a fantastic list of end to end encrypted chat messages. That's not the only place that we should see that pattern popping up. I was finishing some coursework that I was writing for a course that should be out shortly.
I'll have some news around that. In the coming weeks. I was covering a chapter on encryption and it was basically trying to design these systems end to end as much as possible. Now, the business challenge there and this came up in the Facebook issue is how do you make sure that you can still monetize your service?
And of course, the traditional injecting ads or harvesting the content of those communications is no longer possible because of that end to end encrypted. Because only to people with the device, we also see this argument come up in law enforcement, people have challenges around law enforcement, accessing these messages, but that just means they can't go to the system, they can't go to whatsapp to get the message.
They have to actually get a device and then lock it in there, but it changes the design parameters. And that's I think a surmountable problem. That's a problem that people who are building systems should be willing to tackle because the security that it provides for your users for the systems themselves is undeniable.
Having that end to end encryption is absolutely key. So as you're reading this interesting insight into view from inside Facebook around Instagram founders around whatsapp founders. When you see that discussion around monetizing whatsapp and end to end encryption, this is what's going on.
Like I said a short one today. Um Let me know what you think online. Hit me up at marknca in the comments down below for those of you on the vlog, for those of you on the podcast today. I'm sorry if the audio quality is a little sub par.
Like I said, I am on the road. Um hit me up by email me@markn.ca. I hope you have a fantastic day. I will talk to you online and see you on the show tomorrow.
