Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency – Threema (threema.ch)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (15 children)

Let's be honest, Signal is not perfect either:

It requires your phone number
It has had some suspicious funding sources
(UPD: It was funded by CIA)
(UPD2: Here I will quote www.securemessagingapps.com:

This matters because “money talks”, as the saying goes. If the company or person behind the money is likely to have reason not to protect customers’ privacy, it’s important to know. This could be indicative of the company not doing as they say (Google, Whatsapp, for example) or changing their mind once they’ve onboarded enough customers from whom they can make money.

It has incidents (at least once) when backend code hasn't been updated for almost a half year or so
((UPD)Source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/#update-2021-04-06-1-39pm-pdt-by-ryne-hager)

~~(I'm gonna find sources for the last two statements a bit later to not be unsubstantiated)~~
Done.

Although, we all can agree, that Signal is still better than Telegram, or WhatsApp, or Threema, or whatever.
Still, we probably want to look at the better alternatives, like Simplex or Session.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Session is also sus because you effectively cannot host a node, last I have seen. They claim it is "against a Sybil attack" but all it does is making sure only people wih large disposable funds can have nodes, and the effect might be the exact opposite.

Simplex is more interesting in this regard because while I am concerned with initial centralization (the default servers), they made hosting your own easy. But I personally stick with imperfect yet trusty XMPP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

SimpleX is great. BUT it's not user friendly. Thus general adoption for the average user will be hard. Don't get me wrong using the app itself is easy but as soon as someone switches their phone that doesn't have technical knowledge they will loose their chats because they won't understand the concept of moving their DB. Since you don't have an identifier like a phone number with SimpleX those people could even lose contacts as a whole since they generate a new DB, hurting their social connections.

That's the reason I personally never recommend SimpleX to anyone who doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand stuff like that.

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