Oddbean

Exactly what I said in my post above. Durov made it HARD to get Telegram user data. It was easier and cheaper to take him hostage than to steal the user data in bulk. I don't doubt ECHELON can get root access if they want, via hardware trojans. But that's tedious work plus mad skillz.

No point trying to steal Nostr data, since it's all public or encrypted and the npubs hold their own encryption keys. At the most, you could shut down a machine, but there are a gazillion other machines, so good luck with that. His strategic error was in trying to hide data in storage.

Same idea as the people trying to scrape Twitter data. 🤣 On Nostr, you just setup a relay and collect whatever data you can get and read whatever you can read. The idea that you should hide data sources that the public or the operator can see is an antipattern.

It's not about scraping data.. its about actually controlling what people can and cannot say.. right now nostr is niche and doesn't represent a significant threat. Telegram and X are actually messing things up for the thought police

It's not hard to get the data. The problem is they have no content moderation control authority. They want control over what you can say. They already have the means to spy on you. With the narrative falling further and further out of their control with apps like X spying isn't enough, they need pre-Elon twitter 1.0 levels of cooperation from these apps to shut down dissenting voices

They don't need to back door it. Being able to spy on your phone doesn't stop you from still uploading content and saying what you want. They content moderation authority and control over the free speech apps.