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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Gen has nothing to do with this
this isn’t a “gen Z” problem, this is a “normal people” problem. Most people just want something easy, accessible, and familiar.
I’m gen z BTW and I use element
I was overjoyed to learn everyone at my new job uses Signal… Apparently we can even install the desktop app on our work laptops, but I won’t go that far.
why not just use email? i think most college student have it. and you already chating on it
Gen Z is all right. They’re like concentrated Millennial.
If this an engineering school the future is in deeper doodoo than I even imagined.
So you’re mad because people don’t want to download another app and create another account, and generalizing a whole generation because they don’t want to use signal? You’re just bitter.
The generalization is odd, but they don’t want to download another app either. I really hope federation and such is the future just for things like this alone.
There’s no bitterness going on here, it’s probably easy to generalize the people who use Facebook apps especially when they instantly come back saying X app sucks in a rude way.
For me is that there are so many chat apps now, and each is not really that better than the next one.
I had to download telegram because a group of people told me the government or whatever reads the whatsapp conversation, but what are people conversating about that they need to keep it a secret?
I really don’t get it.
local man on privacy community doesn’t understand privacy
When you take a shit you expect privacy don’t you? Why don’t you expect the same from Meta when you use Instagram? Just cus it’s free with ads, means they can stalk you? To me that is unjust, and most of us here, which is why we use apps like signal and try to maintain our privacy, even when corporations will not.
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” - Edward Snowden
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Signal does suck, especially since it doesn’t support sms anymore.
Yes. It lets you still talk with everyone else who isn’t going to care.
It was a good in between step for non technical users to use it as their singular texting app. So while they still SMS with the unwashed masses, they could still be convinced to do encrypted texts and group chats with others. Doing away with SMS forced all these people off Signal since they didn’t want to jump between 2 apps, it was a huge misstep by them that I think cost them their future.
Sucks but it’s the best we got
I don’t disagree, I’m just not going to bitch about not understanding why folks don’t want to install yet another messaging app
And it’s exclusively used by pedophiles and the far right.
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Uhhh THAT’S a broad brush… I use it, and I’m as far lefty left as left liberal can be, and my family is the same. And none of us are pedophiles to my knowledge.
I can understand OP’s desire to not plaster one’s entire living situation on a public forum. The startling lack of privacy awareness among people in general is frightening. In the 60’s there were actual riots over wiretaps on public phones!
Now we ask the wiretaps that we pay to put in our homes: “hey Alexa, can cats eat pancakes?”
Liberal is central… left leaning central.
Alexa isn’t an example of a wiretap and the same laws to access data from them are present with actual wiretaps.
I have a Juris Doctorate in surveillance law in Canada and completed Modern Surveillance Law through Standford.
Literalists…
Well that escalated quickly…
Exclusively? I wasn’t aware they were the only ones who cared about end to end encryption.
Pretty normal reaction after the announcement that Signal got rid of SMS support. A bunch of folks I used to talk to read that and ditched Signal entirely for FB Chat.
They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.
I get that. That is specifically the reason they uninstalled Signal and started using FB.
How many other folks did that?
Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.
It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:
There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.
Who still uses SMS ???
Clearly enough people for this to be a point, a big majority of people in the US still do at least in the places I’ve stayed in.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with SMS.
They are an ancient technology, it was needed before we had phones connected to internet, but now they are a relic. And have been for at least a decade.
They are good at giving us fun by making americans fight each other about the color of their bubbles.
And no, RCS is not the solution.
I think fewer people are actually using SMS than you’d think though - it’s been quietly replaced with RCS.
Holy shit! That’s the most depressing thing I read in a while. :(
How do I convince my family to move onto Signal? We’re missing half the family in the group chat because some of us use Android. BTW, they don’t give a crap about privacy and they know about the Subpoena signal got and are worried looking like criminals.
Me saying i won’t respond unless you use signal wormed
Sorry that your unnecessary tool was shot down and a more approachable user friendly task compliant tool was chosen instead
I thought Instagram was for photos of fitness thots or something not for instant messaging
Its appropriate for the task at hand. No tech knowledge required, and everybody has instagram already.
Lmao
do you actually believe this
If its recommended in the group of relatively tech illiterate young people, then yeah. I don’t think I need to pull up the download statistic right?
the statistic that every young person has Instagram on their phone?
Obviously enough of the people in question have Instagram that they’re going with the IG chat and not Signal
That’s not what was said, and also we seem to be interpreting the scope of “everyone” differently
It is ironic that you call a Proprietary Data Harvester Platform User “Friendly”. Well forget users. Meta even collects data of non users to top off the grimness.
User friendliness =/= Privacy friendly. What I mean is that everybody there (aside from the linux kid) is comfortable with the app. More than goddamn signal…
I really do not see any logical basis that makes you separate privacy friendliness from User Friendliness. If a platform wishes to be user friendly, privacy is also one of the fundamental rights of a user the platform needs to take care of for it to be considered friendly to a user.
The fact that a lot of people, not ‘everybody’, are comfortable with Instagram has no strong points to consolidate your own position. It only describes how good the horrible marketting of Giant Tech Corporations is at entrapping millions of people into using it, generating life long addictions and the eventual wastage of time on degenerate culture. While the Corporations collect all that data available to them to further their own Capitalist interests.
Privacy does come at a cost and compromise. A slightly less funkier UI for a far more secure platform, for essentially 0 cost is a lot one could ask for, especially when you are comparing a Libre project made by a small organization to a proprietary project made by a Multi Billionaire MNC.
I will not be apologetic in saying that you are the child here who is tailing the mass of consumers without proper analysis.
Says signal sucks without actually trying it. Just create a group chat put a link in, job done