🧵 Today’s issue of @platformer is a look at the battle inside Signal. The company is developing features that would make it vulnerable to abuse — and employees are sounding the alarm platformer.news/p/-the-battle-…
The WhatsApp privacy policy disaster has been a boon to the company. I’m told that it now has 40 million users, up from an estimated 20 million last month
But by adding features like group links, and working on features like usernames and crypto payments, employees tell me it’s gradually opening up avenues of abuse.
Because it’s encrypted, and doesn't amplify posts, Signal has resisted having a content policy for 6+ years. It can’t “see” the content, so why have a policy?
But crypto payments will bring bad actors. Usernames will bring impersonation and fraud. And employees say their concerns are falling on deaf ears.
One spoke to me on the record about why he quit the company: “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.”
CEO Moxie Marlinspike told me: “The thing about software is that you never can fully anticipate everything. We just have to be willing to iterate.”
Meanwhile, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton has become heavily involved in daily operations at Signal, interviewing engineers and writing code, I’m told. Call it #deletefacebook, phase 2.
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Two, let’s hold social networks accountable for their part in this. But we need to widen our aperture. platformer.news/p/three-questi…
And three, the big lie about the stolen election may be the most difficult content moderation problem these networks have ever faced. platformer.news/p/three-questi…
Google earned $11.2 billion in profits last quarter and uses all your uploaded photos to train its ML algorithms, which offers it other enormous competitive benefits
Also seems notable that free Google photo storage helped to drive tons of startups out of this market — Everpix, Loom, Ever, Picturelife. Now that they're gone, and Google is tired of losing money on Photos, the revenue switch flips.
I like paying for software generally, and Google Photos is great software. But it's also case of a giant using its infinite resources to reshape the market to its liking and then seeking rents. Not a lot to get excited about there
In May, my sources started sharing secret recordings of meetings inside Facebook. Weekly Q&As with Mark Zuckerberg; briefings about civil rights; even Sheryl Sandberg’s annual Q&A with interns.
I’ll double any likes sent to this tweet for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!
Good thing these attackers just wanted to run a Bitcoin scam and not use the exact same methods to start a nuclear war!
Now the scammers have the Apple and Uber accounts. This is an extremely serious breach of Twitter's security systems, and I hope that (1) the company gets it under control ASAP and (2) that there is a full public accounting of how it happened.
Today in The Interface, @evanspiegel talks about Minis, Snap Map, and standing up for the First Amendment. I liked how he framed this: theverge.com/2020/6/11/2128…
Also talked with current and former employees about Chris Cox's return. He played this role for a lot of folks over the years at Facebook:
Finally, someone sent me Cox's first remarks about returning to Facebook, which he made at today's weekly all-staff Q&A.