Comment by jFriedensreich
Comment by jFriedensreich 11 hours ago
I think this has also a silver lining. The E2E encryption movement especially for messenger apps was largely also used to silently lock users out of their own data and effectively prevent user agency to use their own data to move apps, write automations or archive, this is not just true for whatsapp (the data export feature does not fully work since its launch and was just made to appease some EU law that did not properly check if the button works until the end.) Also signal does not have a way to do this. Maybe with ai coming into the game companies finally decide to provide access to data, I just hope it's in a transparent way with user opt in and user control.
1. Is data encrypted in transit?
2. Can the user access their data at rest?
Those two things are entirely orthogonal.
I don't think you can extrapolate a trend from a few apps having bugs in their export code. Google Takeout is also notoriously buggy and they don't use E2E encryption. A more likely explanation is companies of all kinds don't care that much about export functionality, due to the incentives involved.