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.

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Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency – Threema (threema.ch)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (15 children)

Let's be honest, Signal is not perfect either:

It requires your phone number
It has had some suspicious funding sources
(UPD: It was funded by CIA)
(UPD2: Here I will quote www.securemessagingapps.com:

This matters because “money talks”, as the saying goes. If the company or person behind the money is likely to have reason not to protect customers’ privacy, it’s important to know. This could be indicative of the company not doing as they say (Google, Whatsapp, for example) or changing their mind once they’ve onboarded enough customers from whom they can make money.

It has incidents (at least once) when backend code hasn't been updated for almost a half year or so
((UPD)Source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/#update-2021-04-06-1-39pm-pdt-by-ryne-hager)

~~(I'm gonna find sources for the last two statements a bit later to not be unsubstantiated)~~
Done.

Although, we all can agree, that Signal is still better than Telegram, or WhatsApp, or Threema, or whatever.
Still, we probably want to look at the better alternatives, like Simplex or Session.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.

Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven't gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven't actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That's not true. A phone number is still required to register, you can just set it not to be public.

Source: I just tried to register and it asked for my phone number.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Last I have seen, it still requires a number to register - it just doesn't have to be public.

What gets me the most is the requirement of a smartphone to register. No way I am trusting my non-public chats to a phone, so that means either Waydroid/VM (which creates issues with copypasting) or signal-cli (which is fairly inconvenient).

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