Privacy
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.
Some Rules
- 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
- Don't promote proprietary software
- 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
- Be nice :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
that would do it
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It has been a while since I looked at Wire, and I didn't look very deep, but here's what I noted:
Self-hosting was unavailable at the time.
I believe they violated their privacy policy a while back, by accepting new owners/investors without notifying their users. That kind of behavior is telling of what to expect from an organization, and potentially dangerous (depending on your threat model) if you're trusting them with anything, such as...
I have read complaints that they stored cleartext contact lists on the server, but I haven't verified this myself. (The first two points were already deal-breakers for me, so I didn't bother.)
Looks like both the client and server are open source now, so it's definitely possible to self host. Unlike Signal, Wire also supports federation nowadays https://docs.wire.com/understand/federation/index.html
Does Wire still store metadata on who you message? That seems potentially more damaging than Signal's phone number requirement, at least since the switch to being able to hide your number from everyone.
Wire doesn't require any personally identifying data to register though.
Your right, they could just read any of your messages if they feel like it however. Wouldn't you rather have a phone number associated with an unreadable account? Or no "personally identifying info (besides your entire device...)" but Wire can read and see all of what you send.
Given that Wire uses Signal protocol, are you suggesting that e2e encryption in Signal is not secure?
No, what I'm saying is that if Wire still sends the passwords for the encryption in plaintext to their servers, thats bad. Signal doesn't do that afaik.
I agree that would be a weird thing to do, is there a source for this?
Definitely search on your own, I was only going based off this. Could be fixed by now!
But if it was ever true, that's again, bad. Not something you would even think of doing if your true motives are "privacy"
Yeah that's pretty bad, and I agree that I wouldn't trust a company that did something like that going forward.
I find this site useful to compare messengers. I would trust Wire a tad more because it's hosted in a country with stronger GDPR regulation, vs Signal being hosted in the US.
For my needs, XMPP with Omemo has been unbeatable for a long time
yeah that's a good overview of different protocols/messengers
wire is US-based these days AFAIK - they accepted a bunch from VC money from a firm that does things like data mining and moved to the US
Huh, never really looked into Wire but it seems like its a great option and now im wondering why people bother with signal or matrix if this can do both encryption and federation
Federation sounded interesting so I looked at the website and it sounds like on prem can't yet federate with people using "cloud" which I guess is the hosted version - they can only federate with other on-prem instances.
It looks promising though and would be cool to host my own instance and still chat with friends.
Ok, in like 2 seconds of looking into Wire I see that the app is rated 2.8 stars to Signal's 4.5 and under the "data collected" section it lists name, email, phone number, user ID, photos, and videos. Signal lists phone number.
All you need to create an account is a username and password, so not sure where your name, email, and phone number will come from.
Looks like it is listed on the iOS App Store ‘App Privacy’ section for the Wire app.
it's not information that's required to make an account though 🤷