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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
- 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
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Anyone with experience using Jami? tried using it recently, but could messages were not being received, notification for incoming calls at times were hit and miss. Seems to be updated quite frequently on F-Droid.
Great concept but not stable enough for serious use.
if you want something niche instead of mainstream: Cwtch
p2p, chat-over-onion, meta data suveillance resistant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27643171
Simplex chat, session, Jami or GPG via email
Databag
If we told just anyone, it wouldn’t be private!!!
Srsly any phone app is inherently insecure because the phone itself is insecure. And there’s lots of metadata leakage, like the phone broadcasting its location. There is no “go to app”. It all depends on what you are trying to do and who you are trying to communicate with.
@solrize @GreyTechnician Bro, just remember one thing, “It’s never private”
Matrix but thinking about XMPP as Matrix leaks a loy of metadata and is pretty slow and new.
Session
Neither Matrix nor XMPP are software, those are protocols. Alsp, there is no point in specifying that XMPP is encrypted without doing the same for Matrix, since you can exchange plain text messages there too.
As for the actual question, here you go: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#criteria
https://divestos.org/pages/messengers
I’ve heard great things about matrix, but I only really use signal. It’s the only private messenger that’s convieniant and simple to understand for non tech savy people to switch to (at least in my experience)
Matrix has many features which make it antagonistic to privacy. For example:
Since I could never get my family to switch to anything else I just assume all of my communications are accessible by the government(s) and their corporate owners, so I censor myself.
A regular user like myself finds it easier to answer this question with 3 options:
Signal and Threema are centralized options. With Signal planning on rolling out usernames it will be an excellent choice, hopefully.
Matrix, XMPP, Session, DeltaChat and others are decentralized, and some allow for self-hosting.
Briar is P2P.
Signal.
Not necessarily because it’s better or because I like it. I actually don’t like it: Signal requiring a phone number really, REALLY doesn’t sit right with me, I hate not being able to back up my messages and having to hold the tiny button on the screen to record an audio or video message really sucks.
But it’s the easiest and most common of the truly private communication apps to get non-technical people to install.
You can definitely back up your messages… I have auto backups to my SD card…
You can backup your messages with signal… I do it whenever I switch to a new phone.
They claim it’s to generate your encryption key but then I don’t understand why you can’t just give it a passphrase instead. Pretty dumb for a so-called privacy related app.
Take a look at Simplex.
I took a look. It ate my battery three times faster than Whatsapp,
TemanTelegram and Signal cumulated.It’s a neat idea, but it’s not going to be a go-to messager anytime soon. They haven’t figured out how to efficiently deliver messages, large rooms have issues, and adding someone requires way more extra leg work than Signal.
It’s easy telling somebody your phone number. It’s harder to swap QR codes and hope that the system of relays will identify both of your devices as being online simultaneously.
That’s probably the flipside of polling-based updates.
Briar
From a privacy perspective, it’s pretty damn good, one of the best.
Hell on battery, unfortunately. I keep it around as an emergency use only service, and don’t run it otherwise.
I just wish the desktop version had Bluetooth functionality, because Waydroid doesn’t allow Bluetooth usage.