From what is written, I understand this to mean that users can select this feature for specific conversations. That not all messages are subject to this encryption. I am not usually one for paranoia, but is anyone else becoming more suspicious about Facebooks motivations and involvement with gov? This feature is a massive boost for intelligence services dealing with unsophisticated actors. This reduces the haystack s…
> Why doesn't FB just apply encryption on all messages? The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. I highly doubt there is any government intervention in FB's business strategy, but there seems to be plenty of cooperation after the business decisions are made. (The same is largely true with Microsoft, Google, and yes, even Apple.) It's not real…
Facebook can do fine without that information: they have more information than they can develop ad services for at the moment; they could use a lot more engineers though. The goodwill from the dev community in allowing appropriate targeting is far more important to them.
Two good examples being location and language: you can advertise for people in a certain place or who speak a certain language, but there are many unserved combinations, like tourists, language minorities and commuters. In my case, I’d love to see ads on learning Swedish: Facebook can see some of my friends speak it, and this is new.
Source: worked for Fb, but in Engagement, not the Ads team; offered a lot of targeting suggestions, but most where “presumably not the biggest opportunities (they) could work on”. At Facebook’s scale, we are talking really big numbers.