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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal? (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There are several open protocols that meet your criteria that aren’t Matrix (with most of them using double-ratchet encryption similar to if not exactly like Signal). Due to server costs (Matrix eats a lot of RAM & storage), medium-sized entities usually bow out so the Matrix network largely consist of a few 1–10 user servers & massive centralization around Matrix.org & the hosted servers they provide. Since almost all the messages get synced to the Matrix.org server if just one Matrix.org user is in your room or whatever, all metadata will be synced to the mothership in Matrix.org that was originally funded by Israeli intelligence.