“Metadata of the metadata” informs product design without allowing backdoors | Hacker News Reader

“Metadata of the metadata” informs product design without allowing backdoors

wired.com

51 pointswalterbell11 comments

What an egregious mislabeling.

Data -> Chats and actual Identity

Metadata -> Who with whom and when from where,...

They construe payment info, PII and similar except chat contents as metadata and say metadata of metadata was that which is normally called metadata. And that it was safe to share despite this obviously being not true.

Everyone remembers https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

How does one understand the authors motivation?

> Data -> Chats and actual Identity

> Metadata -> Who with whom and when from where,...

Metadata of the metadata: "aggregated datasets showing how many users a platform has, where accounts are created and when, how information travels, which types of messages and format-types are fastest to spread, which messages are commonly reported, and how (and when) users are booted off."

That information should be safe to share if aggregated over all users.

One man’s metadata is another’s data.

> Real-time, encrypted chat apps ... these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users.

I reject their framing. From the centralized perspective of Big Tech it's awfully convenient to blame user freedom. But while individuals can propagate disinformation among themselves, what really spreads it is for-profit men-in-the-middle "driving engagement". Social media especially has hijacked our sense of social proof. It would take a lot of social capital to directly message your friends with say Covid conspiracy theories ("you really believe this shit?"). Whereas with social media you can lazily broadcast it and the "algorithm" will emphasize it to people who seem receptive while hiding opposing opinions from them. Creating these isolated memetic bubbles practically guarantees a healthy breeding ground for disinformation.

I also reject their framing: the most common platforms used for disseminating some horrible info within various groups aren't actually encrypted (E2E) at all.

On an E2E encrypted chat how are these companies able to track what is being shared, by how many, and how much? Surely that's no visible ? Admittedly I'm no expert on these platforms or cryptography, but as a layperson I would expect the content of my E2E encrypted chat to be opaque to outside observers including the company who offers it.

It was beginning to be a while since the last hit piece against encrypted messaging, but here we had it all.

Of course this is very bad. Only journalists should be allowed to manipulate the public since they will always do it in a Good Way (TM).

Just a note that Meta data now can also refer to everything Facebook collects...

Meta's data

Isn't the cat already out of the bag?

Are you going to outlaw E2E?

Nah. The future is random static, where the signal is indistinguishable. Any framing of metadata of matadata as some kind of way of avoiding backdoors is a subversive back door play.

In the future you will see and hear nothing, and you will be happy.

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