Chat control is back on the agenda again and the works is kept in secret.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
922 points (99.0% liked)
Privacy
31981 readers
322 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
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've already addressed this but i guess i'll expand on it.
Signal would not be able to add backdoors to all its users. Security researchers would see pretty quickly (more below) and that would be pretty big news because Signal is quite popular with people who care about their privacy.
They could in theory backdoor an individual's Signal app but, again, that's pretty inefficient. If anyone ever noticed it would be a big black mark against Signal, though they may not have much choice in the matter if it really came to it. However, we know that big governments and other sophisticated attackers usually prefer to just stick spyware on your phone. It's easier, more comprehensive, and doesn't require collaboration with Signal.
In contrast, you don't need to do any of that with Telegram because it's not E2EE. Your argument is basically "security features can be defeated by a sufficiently advanced attacker so use this other service that doesn't have them to begin with." This makes no fucking sense.
I don't know what you're talking about with FOSS stuff. Yeah, Telegram is open source. Signal is too. Some Signal forks (particularly the ones with "Signal" in their names) have been killed but others still exist, ex molly.im.
Signal client does have reproducible builds and has since 2016, as far as i know. This is another point against Signal being backdoored.
Beyond that, Signal has gone through a number of formal security audits. As far as i know, Telegram has not.
Finally, Telegram itself. Telegram could simply enable E2EE for all chats. They choose not to and that is concerning if you care about your privacy or security.
Yeah Signal could be better but that isn't a case to use Telegram over Signal when Telegram is worse in almost every respect.
I agree that signal has a more robust security model. What I mean is that itbhasbalso habe risks, and a lot of people are ignoring it.
The backdoor could be a sleeping function activated from outside to targets of interest or 'special' updates from the google store (i.e.: with the help of google install a different version of the app to the target). But I'm not a security nor android expert, and it's all theoretical if this attack vector is possible, but I think that is unlikely.
Also, if the NATO country where I live wants to spy my mobile, it would use Pegasus ๐คท๐ฝโโ๏ธ
Off topic: The Signal reproducible builds don't work since, at least, may.