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Comment by darkwater

8 hours ago

You are proposing scenarios in which the only safe posture is to not chat at all...

There is the potential to use homomorphic encryption so that encrypted text can support operations like string search while encrypted, so unencrypted indexes would never need to be stored on user devices. It is a huge hassle though - it requires a ton of compute and is still very slow and limited, it's much more complex, and research is still ongoing regarding security. However if you want to truly minimize the amount of unencrypted data on your device this could one day be an option.

The whole thread is about permanently storing every single conversation forever vs conversations that get deleted shortly after. If the latter is chosen, the blast radius is significantly smaller.

  • The blast radius of a single person conversations (shoulder surfing) which doesn't make any sense because if you are the kind of person targeted for their conversations you are going to take anyway other countermeasures in any case (in addition to probably disappearing messages).

    But for normal people, the biggest risk is companies using their chats to train models / dispatch ads etc to which the only solution is E2EE.