I used the LINE messenger for the very first time the other day. Downloaded from the official source, my goal was simple: a single, private chat with one person, which LINE claims is protected by End-to-End Encryption (E2EE).
Our "conversation" was minimal – mostly just test messages. One single contact.
A few days later, I log in to find my account has been temporarily (for how long? =)) blocked.
This raises a cognitive dissonance for me:
Promise vs. Reality: We're told E2EE means no one, not even the company, can read our chats. If that's true, on what basis was I blocked? I have to assume it's related to something in the chat, because I literally did nothing else in the app. But if it is E2EE, how could they know? Does this mean E2EE is just a marketing buzzword and monitoring is happening anyway? I'd genuinely like to know what the real factors are.
Absolute Opacity: This is the real issue. I received zero explanation. No email, no warning, not even a vague hint at which policy I "violated." And look, I'll be the first to admit I didn't read the 100-page Terms of Service – who does? But that's not the point. Even if I did technically violate some obscure rule, the core problem is the total lack of transparency. I was left with no idea, not even a guess, as to what happened. This opaque, black-box process is the real problem.
This situation is deeply concerning. What if I lived in a country like Japan, where LINE is the default, essential messenger? I'd just be cut off from my digital life without cause or appeal. And if this happens on LINE, what stops WhatsApp from doing the same? (And let's not even talk about Telegram, which is 100% cringe and a lost cause for privacy anyway).
My takeaway: To be honest, I went into this as an experiment, and this incident 100% confirmed my expectations.
This isn't just a LINE problem. We see it constantly from Big Tech like Meta and Google. They ban users, often with no explanation, because they have the full legal right to do so. We all agreed to this when we blindly clicked "accept" on their Terms of Service.
This is exactly why my advice is this: you must factor in this risk with all commercial messengers. When you use any private, centralized platform, you have to accept the fact that you can be denied service at any time, for any reason, and they don't even have to tell you why. That is the price of admission we all paid.
The promise of a "private chat" apparently doesn't include the guarantee of access to the platform itself.
#privacy #E2EE #LINE #messengers #transparency #BigTech #Meta #Google #ban #DigitalRights #PlatformRisk #ToS #experiment #FuckTelegram
Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Andrii Sudak • • •No, E2E apps still block people without reading their chats. There are a lot of other signals they take into account, notably metadata, the OS you're using, how suspicious your messaging patterns are, your IP address, the phone number / other personal data you registered with, etc etc.
Many people in privacy circles unwittingly fall into these patterns.
Andrii Sudak
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •This post contains my thoughts on the opacity of blocking, first and foremost.
Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Andrii Sudak • • •I don't think you realize how necessary blocking actually is.
Imagine you have a country of 100 million people, each of which has a single account at your service (like most users have). Also imagine you have 1000 fraudsters. A fraudster, even when doing everything manually, with no computer programs to make them work faster (and that's not how fraudsters work), can easily make 25 accounts per day. That's ~9 million fraudulent accounts per year. This means that, after 10 years, *50%* of all your accounts are fraudulent accounts that are constantly sending spam.
We had a world of no blocking in the email of the early 2000s, and look where that got us.
Andrii Sudak
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •I am not against blocking or even control (when agreed upon).
This time, I just realized that what pisses me off the most about this is the opacity of the blocking.
I also understand that, technically and economically, this is almost impossible, and that analyzing each user individually is not a viable solution.
I will try to expand on my opinion later, which lies at the core of my protest: transparency and proper architecture in general, particularly when it comes to messengers.