It's great that Facebook is making Messenger encrypted end to end.
Why am I suspicious that there will turn out to be fine print that undermines this in some key way(s)?
Experience with the tech industry requires suspicions.
I'll keep using Signal, thanks.
@dangillmor AFAICT, whatever you think of Meta, WhatsApp seems to do E2E properly, based on the Signal tech. There are business advantages to genuinely not being able to see what people are saying to each other. I once met people from a group at Google that did nothing but process gmail search warrants all day long… wasn't a small group. Signal doesn’t need one.
@timbray Signal publish their running costs, and all their infra costs are around 15m USD to run a global messaging service, and 50m all in.
Any idea what the extra infra costs for the creepy meta crawling and general surveillance built into other services might be, to require all the revenue generation via ad tech?
50m USD globally seems like a good deal to be free from adtech as a way to finance vital services, and it makes me wonder what the numbers might be other services online too.
@timbray I ask as there’s obviously costs to offering network services like Masto/Twitter etc, but if you take away the expectation of VC pleasing returns, and settle for utility like ones (which they are increasingly cast as) it reopens questions about how we fund them.
I’d totally be ok with things like the sov tech fund for my country covering my its share of running costs from general taxation, to offer a universally available service.
@mrchrisadams Mmmm… Web Search as a regulated public utility. I think I could get behind that.
@timbray actually, I think web search is a good example - I can totally see it being societally useful for there to be a known figure for the running cost of a search engine of Google’s quality ten years ago for example with all the ad funding requirements.
Ecosia is the closest thing I know, who are v transparent about their running costs (monthly breakdowns below)
https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planting-receipts
Thing is, even they’re reliant on Bing tho (who jacked search API prices 10x recently on them)
@boris know any search-as-public-utility projects?
@christina @mrchrisadams @timbray @boris
There is the Open Search Foundation https://opensearchfoundation.org/en/about-open-search-foundation/
I first found out about them by exploring MetaGer search, which is run by a non-profit, https://suma-ev.de/en
On the for profit side, there's mojeek, who according to their principles doesn't track you or bias the search results. https://www.mojeek.com/about/
