Privacy

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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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How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal? (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

92 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are no shades of grey in encrypted communications.

Your messages are either plain text or not to 3rd party.

Sometimes it appears to be encrypted, but there loopholes that make it possible to significantly reduce decryption costs. It is plain text to those who put the loopholes, like specially crafted constants in the algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

There are indeed shades of grey. Not only the presence of encryption itself matters, but the metadata, as well as details of the implementation. For example, Signal has all the messages encrypted - but it has the capability to know the identities of everyone and to build their social graph due to centralization.