Privacy

32120 readers

270 users here now

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 :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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]

93 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was referring to the OP's comment on "iOS having a backdoor". I am not saying I agree with OP, just was trying to see if there was something like a backdoor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh sorry about that! Somehow missed that. Still weird by OP to claim systems are insecure just because vulnerabilities are discovered. That‘s the case for every system out there. Vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed. And mobile operating systems typically have stricter security features and permission management than Desktop OS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

This is true. I still agree that closed source OSes are not private or as secure as if they were open source. Something like deblobbed AOSP (DivestOS) is better because it has strong sandboxing, full system MAC policies, and vastly reduced attack surface to google Android (or Apple). Desktop does not have a strong enough threat model, wish it was better.