To be honest, I don&#x27;t understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates.<p>- If someone from Facebook&#x2F;Telegram&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;etc wants to know what you&#x27;re writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you&#x27;d theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that.<p>- If they want to know what you have written in the past, they can instruct the app to send them the conversation log.<p>- If Google (or Apple or Microsoft, respectively) want to know what you&#x27;re writing, they can instruct the OS to send them the data.
(Google&#x27;s &quot;Android Backup Service&quot; for example also backs up &quot;third party settings and data&quot; [1]. I don&#x27;t know about the details of the backup service, but this shows to me it&#x27;s quite possible that your key or conversation logs might even land accidentally on some providers&#x27; servers without them having any bad intent.)<p>- If (three letter agency of your choice) wants to get the data, they can just force any of the above companies via NSLs to get it for them.<p>- If any of the US strategic partners want to get the data, they can likely make a deal with an intelligence agency.<p>- Lastly, if the messenger company wants to mine or sell user data, they still have a lot of stuff that cannot be encrypted for operational reasons (such as your contact list and the phone numbers of all your contacts).<p>That leaves to me the only group for which &quot;overlay encryption&quot; brings an actual benefit political activists in a country not at all affiliated with the US - or highly knowledgeable individuals who carefully control which updates they get. Both groups are important to consider but likely had ways to protect their communication before.<p>To actually protect communication not just from &quot;the government&quot; but also from the private industry, we would at least need some independent party to vet app updates.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;nexus&#x2F;answer&#x2F;2819582?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;nexus&#x2F;answer&#x2F;2819582?hl=en</a>