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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> You're suggesting they purposely put a backdoor into all their custom methods? Why?

I'm not sure what you mean by "custom methods", but I'm not saying they have bypassed the e2e encryption - I'm just saying that they technically could.

And as for why they would do that, they might get compelled by a government to do it secretly. As far as I know that hasn't happened yet but I see no reason it couldn't and it would take a whistleblower to find out.

> Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.

I agree, it is the best option available. But Apple/Meta are technically lying when they say it's impossible for them to read your messages.

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I disagree because these systems are amoungst the most abused in the world. The only way a backdoor realistically exists is if they have code that is prebuilt backdoor that they serve to inviduals upon request.

As a company you'd be asking for an internal implosion of your company if everything had an additional backdoor in it.

Any backdoor added is a backdoor the thousands to tens of thousands of advanced hackers are always actively trying to breach. So if they do it they'd be doing it very selectively via special served code.

It's also the only way they'd stop whistle blowers.

Now that I say it. That's 100% what they would do. But again it's a crazy high risk almost zero reward action for them. Is the CIA paying apple a bajillion dollars for phones? No so why unless their arm is twisted would they risk billions of dollars for basically no gain?

They are not lying when they say that they cannot read your messages at rest or in transit without actively changing the code so that you start trusting a new key. The keys sync between devices in ways that Apple cannot read.

This is not bulletproof, because they can potentially change the code to do this - this is what the FBI vs Apple thing was a few years ago was all about.

> ...without actively changing the code so that you start trusting a new key.

Yes but the problem is there's nothing stopping them from doing that. If Apple/Meta rely on the argument that they technically cannot read people's messages then they will eventually lose because it's simply not true.

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