[Tutanota]

Good for Meta and their user base! It's great to see Big Tech follow suit. We've been doing this for a decade already as only end-to-end encryption can truly protect data.

Plus, it's going to help with fighting bills like the Online Safety Bill and Chat Control when huge corporations join us; so bottom line: great news!

[cies]

Possibly good for meta (if they were forced to do this by law, this means they did not want to do this them selves, which by definition makes it "not good for Meta").

Certainly not good for their user base, as (as many pointed out) it's not safe if the clients are all closed source. This promotes a false sense of security, which is worse than an understood lack of security.

[Tutanota]

Agreed, should have phrased this more carefully!

[Dah00n]

What Big Tech really wants is metadata. Metadata and which images are sent isn't encrypted. So this is E2EE minus what Meta wants to see. If one cares about privacy, one cares about metadata. Access to metadata equals poor privacy and is fluff encryption at best.

[Tutanota]

Absolutely right, and for that reason most tech-savvy people will still not trust Meta with their data. But that they start encrypting end-to-end is a good thing, regardless.