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] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's impossible to escape the surveillance of those three letter agencies. We only got a brief glimpse into the other side of the curtain back in 2013, and there is no idea how advanced their surveillance technologies are, so why bother for a normie?

It's also painstaking if not impossible to wipe all your metadata from the internet, which can later be mined to infer personal data and sold by data brokers. Not to mention that people have jobs and use their credit cards, no way even to hide the most important personal identifying information.

So using Signal, despite being centralized, is not too bad at all. Very few people can totally sacrifice convenience for privacy.

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

Not to mention that people have jobs and use their credit cards, no way even to hide the most important personal identifying information.

Exactly, this is a lost cause. If you participate in society your essential data are simply out there. For most people the task is to minimize their footprint. If we are talking about evading mass surveillance, then we should take for granted that the person will be to one or another degree marginalized, or lead a fringe lifestyle.