Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency
threema.chOver the past days, two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
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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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This is completely false. They can absolutely see who is texting who, in fact they need it to be able to route messages. They have message timestamps, and phone numbers stored in their database.
Question, why do you “trust” signal? You can’t see what code their centralized server is running, unlike matrix which you can self-host and build from source. You don’t have to “trust” matrix, you can verify it for yourself.
Signals server is open source. You can run a server. You just can’t connect to the main net because each server is it’s own thing so it doesn’t make sense besides for development purposes.
Please don’t spread misinformation.
They went over a year without publishing their server updates. And how do you know signal is running the code they say they are? Do you trust them?
The good thing here is that you don’t need to trust the server in order to have a secure communication since your clients decrypt and encrypt and not the server.
Yes they can optimize with things like this but that doesn’t make it insecure. It’s still the most secure solution that the average person can use.
Threema doesn’t even have the server open sourced at all, are for profit and their encryption has been compromised.
Session is shady.
Matrix is a metadata nightmare due to it’s federated aspects.
SimpleX is the only thing that is secure, anonymous and good in this regards but it has some small details left that prevents people from switching. I.e. simple things like the fact that you can’t see an overview of your images and videos sent in a chat without scrolling up all those messages. It seems trivial but for the average user stuff like that is important since they know it and use it every day in other messengers.