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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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The biggest one people usually get wrong is thinking their messages on WhatsApp, Telegram, and other proprietary messengers are private
My brother does this. And it’s easy to see how people fall for this when the disinformation from those companies keeps telling you how private your messages are and that not even WhatsApp can read them. Yet when you lose your old phone and reinstall on a new phone, your old messages magically show up without you having to provide an encryption key.
FWIW, I swap between phones weekly (separate work phone w/o cameras, but same phone number), and transfer my WhatsApp account at the same time. Both the phones have their own unique message history, and it does not sync between devices. I do not have backups enabled on either phone.
Do they? I thought you had to explicitely back them up to get them on a new device. At least that’s how it was when I still used it.
They do with Telegram. In WhatsApp (if I recall correctly) it auto-retrieves from your google drive.
(Come to think of it…if that means the encryption key is just with you in your google drive and not with WhatsApp, then is that more secure than I have previously believed??)
With Signal they prompt you to pull the data and generate and encryption key. If you lose either of those things then there’s no way to get your messages back since no one else has them.
The Google Drive backups are not encrypted by default. It looks like they’ve recently added the option to encrypt backups with your own key or password, which is a decent feature.
Telegram doesn’t surprise me, chats aren’t even encrypted per default in some instances (group chats, I believe?)
But then again, how solid is any encryption if Matrix bridges can exist?
No Telegram chats are end-to-end encrypted by default. And I don’t know anyone who’d use the feature regularly (it’s a hassle).
And, to be fair, it’s not really necessary for most day to day messaging.
That’s not true. Please don’t spread misinformation. That’s literally the point of this thread.
TLS encryption to telegram servers is not e2ee. That’s the point
Indeed. That’s literally what I said.
Your sentence, and punctuation, are ambiguous. When I read it I thought you were saying they were end to end encrypted. But seeing your second comment and rereading it, I can see how you meant it to be they are not end to end encrypted
I think it’s very much necessary to insist on our right to privacy. Personal chats not being encrypted should be a clear and absolute NO for anyone.
Ideally, yeah. Practically, shit like stickers or media sharing is way more important to the vast majority of people.
Matrix bridges have nothing to do with encryption, they read the messages exactly the same way a client would, and send them to the other side of the bridge exactly the same way a client would.
They have a lot to do with encryption. As an example, Signal and Matrix use different encryption standards. So to get a message across, it needs to be decrypted mid-transit, to then be re-encrypted with the protocol of the recipient.
Any one of your contacts can set this up without your knowledge or consent, and then there’s a gap in the encryption. They can just freely give away the keys to their chats they have with you, and now a third-party has the means to decrypt your messages.
That’s pretty fucked if you think about it, but there’s not much you can do.
Sure, it’s not a huge problem if the service doing it is verifiable to have good security and doesn’t snoop, but it’s still adding another link in the chain to trust and to keep intact.