I currently use Telegram for my friends and family, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UK Government is either reaching agreement for backdoors with messaging services, or is trying its hardest to.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues or is that a good place to head?
Telegram is the least secure thing there is. Not only it’s complete zero effort security, it’s also much above zero effort to advertise itself as almost secure. Not a good combination as you know.
I’ve honestly found signal better than matrix.
Matrix is just not there yet in terms of features UI etc and is less private than signal because it collects way more metadata and stuff. I know the idea of federation is cool, but Signal works better for the privacy aspect.
I currently use Telegram for my friends and family, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UK Government is either reaching agreement for backdoors with messaging services, or is trying its hardest to.
Unless you start an encrypted chat, Telegram chats are not E2E.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues or is that a good place to head?
Host your own Matrix node, and then you don’t have to worry about prying eyes. Realistically, instead of worrying about the protocol, worry about the content of the text. Use PGP to encrypt your own text and send it over clearnet. Who cares at that point.
Definitely host your own node! It’s trivial for a server admin to add a hidden bot to every chat and while it’s still E2EE, an unknown party could still have a copy and key to read it.
Really good talk from DEFCON 32 about the service “Anom” by Joseph Cox (sorry for the lack of a link, at lunch, on mobile and about to get back to work).
hello beautiful people of lemmy I’m excited to make my first comment in here
so I wanted to ask: considering that WhatsApp is a big threat to privacy and even worse because of google and iOS backups, how big of an improvement would it be not using it and using the secret chat option in telegram instead? That would solve the issue wouldn’t it? As far as I know the concern is with normal non encrypted conversations and the groups channels and all those.
I would love to use signal with everyone but where I live it seems that there is 0 worries about the topic so I only use it with my more “international” people. The most I can get is probably to use telegram E2EE.
My response to the body of this post is https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/
This might address the URL of this post (I’ve never interacted with “iCloud” so I don’t necessarily know what would be a good replacement for it): https://www.privacyguides.org/en/document-collaboration/
Is Briar any good?
You may want SimpleX. You can still self-host your own server if you wish, but it doesn’t have nearly the metadata issues of matrix and encryption keys are stored in a database that you back up instead of constantly breaking
Last time I tried Simplex, the desktop app was incompatible with the mobile app. Do you know whether this has been fixed?
I haven’t personally tried it, but I think there’s a setting in the mobile app for using it with a desktop. So I assume it is fixed, but I won’t swear to it.
I’ve heard good things about simplex give it a look
