> the controversial privacy feature used by nearly all its rivals

"controversial" according to who? The NSA / GCHQ?

Listed in the article are the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors and removes child sexual abuse material from the internet.

The recent Meta lawsuits also mention opposition from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Meta's own executives: Monika Bickert (head of content policy) and Antigone Davis (global head of safety). Both executives mention the danger end-to-end encryption poses to children when attached to a social media graph.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-executive-warn...

> Both executives mention the danger end-to-end encryption poses to children when attached to a social media graph

So the fact that we welded a messaging platform onto a global-child-discovery-service is bad? Sure. Not encrypting that messaging platform is sort of closing the barn door after the horse has gone walkabout

It is a considerably larger threat for anonymous strangers to be able to establish private lines of communication with children than for them to know that Lisa Simpson (8) lives in Springfield and attends Springfield Elementary. In terms of discovery, most people are already aware that children can be found in school.

I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion? The risk in being able to connect to a random victim somewhere in the world appears to be strictly less than being able to target a specific victim in your local geographical area to whom you could gain physical access

Hence why nobody up in arms (in either direction) about e2e encryption for Chatroulette

Good to see this called out. The HN echo chamber has this really terrible habit of attributing any disagreement with the prevailing opinion here to big, shadowy forces with evil motives (billionaires, corporations, three letter agencies, politicians, etc) instead of facing the reality that sometimes well meaning people just have different values and priorities than us. Very rarely does that narrative get challenged directly.