Podcasting “When Automation Becomes Enforcement”

Are disappearing messages part of end-to-end encryption, or are they just DRM?

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “When Automation Becomes Enforcement,” about the debate of interoperability and end-to-end encryption in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and how that relates to the long-running battle over who’s in charge: you, or your computer?

https://onezero.medium.com/when-automation-becomes-enforcement-677461a78e62

When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I thought they were stupid, but I was wrong. I thought that the point of disappearing messages was to let you send secrets to someone you didn’t trust, because the message would disappear and thus be safe.

Obviously, this is stupid. If you send a secret to someone you don’t trust, that untrustworthy person can take a screenshot, or use another device to photograph their screen. Or, you know, they can just remember the secret and blab it. Technology can’t make untrustworthy people trustworthy.

But then I had the other use-case for disappearing messages explained to me: not enforcing agreements about data-handling, but rather, automating them. You and I might trust each other not to blab our mutual secrets, but we might…