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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Is there any good private messenger at all? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been inspecting this topic quite a lot and I'm a little confused now. So, we have reasons not to use Signal, reasons not to use Matrix, there were also some claims about Session being a fraught. Briar is mostly activists related (not very suitable for daily use), XMPP lacks good clients and suffers from fragmentation of protocol standards implementation, SimpleX is too feature-incomplete (no UnifiedPush support, big battery drain on Android, very decent desktop client without any message sync). I can't say a lot about Threema or Wire, as I'm not very familiar with them.

So, my question is — is there any good private messenger at all? What do you think is the most acceptable option?

EDIT: In addition to my post:

All messengers have their flaws, I'm well aware of that. I was interested in hearing users' opinions regarding these shortcomings, not in finding the perfect messenger. I may have worded my thoughts incorrectly, sorry for that.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (4 children)

DeltaChat. I don't use it myself because it's built on electron (which basically excludes 99% of modern chat clients); but as it's technically an email client turned into a chat client, we can assume you're protected by PGP when writing to most users, and with the added effect of not needing to convince anyone to install anything since from their end it's just an email.

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

E-mail is horrible for privacy, spam, instant messaging, etc. PGP "works" in very limited scenarios, and e-mail is not really one of them.

Plus these two statements seem unplausible for me:

we can assume you're protected by PGP when writing to most users,

and

and with the added effect of not needing to convince anyone to install anything since from their end it's just an email.

I disagree with the first statement, most users don't know what PGP is and therefore don't have keys, so you can't encrypt anything to them. The only way most users would use PGP is if something sets it up for them, alá protonmail or my using some special client. Since you've said that from their end it is just an e-mail, how does Deltachat add any meaningful encryption?

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