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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.
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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I feel like the difference is not that big, though.
If you rent, your landlord has a right to enter your apartment, even though they rarely use that right. Sometimes, they can check on things. The same applies to apartments in personal ownership: if police has a warrant, they can enter and see if there’s illegal activity. So based on this analogy, no, apartments are not “encrypted” chat rooms, and I don’t think any significant number of places would be considered “encrypted” or “fully private”, if you must.
Continuing with the analogy, Telegram can view and intervene in the activity on the platform, just like landlords or police, but Durov, let’s call him a landlord, protects privacy of his tenants, not letting the law enforcement in.
Speaking of E2EE platforms, I’m sure there’s crime happening on them, because it’s logical for criminals to use more secure protocols, yet I don’t see the same arguments made about them. It’s just they are providing the same (better!) tools to the criminals without an option for law enforcement to see the content (but perhaps with options to ban on request).
And frankly I don’t think there’s too big of a difference between E2EE and non-E2EE platforms in terms of conscience: the former just deliberately deprive themselves of an opportunity to see what content goes through their services.
P.S. that said, I don’t think it’s ok that Telegram promotes the service as private, and that Durov ignored requests to nuke known illegal activity.
But the difference is massive. Telegram, because E2EE does not work for the majority of its use cases, is hoarding tons of CSAM and other illegal content. This isn’t just about the “criminals” who are adding illegal content, its about Telegram’s access and hoarding of this data.
On the other hand, Signal is simply a transport vehicle for data. No illegal content is stored or accessible by Signal, its developers or anyone who may gain access to their infrastructure - the complete opposite of the situation over at Telegram. Signal cannot be implied to be storing illegal content because they simply don’t store any content. Law enforcement can ask Signal to provide all the data they have on specific users, and they have, but the only data they have is when you created your account and the last day (not time) a client pinged their servers.