When it comes to location tracking and many other things, data retention and use policies are just a useful distraction from the real problem which is that they're able to collect the data at all.
The article is actually pretty balanced. Yes Proton is secure and private, but if you’re hiding from law enforcement, don’t expect a third party to take the fall for you.
Firefox blocked this page because it might try to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit).
No. Whatsapp’s metadata is not encrypted and can be used by its parent company, also backups are not secure. While telegram’s is opt in (yeah that sucks and here’s there excuse for that tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple), they are as secure as signal’s (if not more).
I am not talking about mtproto lmao. I was talking about their opt-in e2ee feature. Edit: Also the research you shared is based on mtproto 1.0 which telegram abandoned almost a decade ago and there have been No such defects found in mtproto 2 yet.
And that UX makes it a hard sell to non-tech/privacy folks.
I had a few converts, then they pulled SMS. My converts left.
Telegram has its problems, I completely agree the encryption issue is problematic. But how do you get non-tech people to use a tool like this when to have a new device get the history, or signing into multiple devices simultaneously, requires transmitting an encryption key? I really don’t know.
I know SimpleX is working on this very issue - their current approach requires switching between active devices by scanning a QR code (or sharing code between devices out-of-band). So currently only one device can be active with your credsntials/ID. It has an ok UI, I’d say slightly better than Signal. But it’s security and privacy are just about the best I’ve seen.
This seems to be the big hurdle - people want a simple login, most don’t care if their convos are stored in servers iut means they can just login.
I’m using telegram with a few people for just this reason, since it gets us off SMS. They like that they can use whatever device is in front of them.
Getting people to switch to Telegram is far easier than anything else, since it’s UI is much better than Signal, Wire, XMPP clients (which can be some of the best).
We know exactly how bad Whatsapp is from a privacy standpoint - I’d choose telegram over it any day.
I would prefer telegram because its just not from Meta. There is bounty on breaking telegram’s protocol too.
Telegram sells ads on public channels with consent of owners and the ads are based on the channel data and not users data. They are back up with their crypto schemes, infact idk whats wrong with crypto, they are better for privacy than normal bank transactions. Anyone cant pay from their pocket for lifetime, it was coming since longway because telegram have no parent company to fund it neither its founder are that rich to spend billions of dollars on it every year. Those “nitro” features didnt take anything away from free users tho, also if they are trying to cover up their cost from the userbase that just proves they have no dubious financing from backdoors.
I dont know how rape laws are connected with a messenger being based there. US have its social problems too or wherever signal is located, every country have social issues.
Yeah facebook is big enough reason to not use facebook. On top of that there have been no data breaches, almost no big outages in telegram till date. They offer a lot of features, from bots to channels, to large public communities and much more.
Telegram just claims its private enough and they never said they are e2ee by default, I dont see the misinformation here, yeah they exaggerate it sometimes but the fact that there have been no data breaches in a decade with almost 800 million monthly active users is quite a bit of achievement. They invested on developing their own encryption protocol, it maybe less private but they made it to remove complexities which signal have. There’s no point on having some 100% secure stuff when no one gonna use it due to complexities, telegram have fueled pro democratic protests worldwide and I thank them for that atleast (even they got banned in many countries for doing so).
MTProto is what Telegram uses for “Secret Chats”, their opt-in end-to-end encryption. Normal messages aren’t encrypted at all. They’re stored in plain text on Telegram servers. The fact that E2EE is opt-in already makes this app ridiculous. On top of that, it isn’t even secure or private lol
the fact that E2EE is opt-in already makes this app ridiculous
in matter of privacy, yes. But it have cool features so.
They’re stored in plain text on Telegram servers No, non secret chats use mptroto but with different schema, thats not plain servers. And no data breach have been reported in telegram yet if it was “that” easy to breach them. From my last comment: “Also the research you shared is based on mtproto 1.0 which telegram abandoned almost a decade ago and there have been No such defects found in mtproto 2 yet.”
I’m not saying that WhatsApp is the good guy here, Meta sucks but compared to Telegram I rather trust them if I have to.
And the unencrypted backups are only problematic when you use the automatic Google Drive upload.
They tell whatever they want until their claims can be validated with the source code. If we take it for granted that they use an original, unmodified version of the signal protocol programming libraries, there are still multiple questions:
how often do they update the version they use
what are they doing with the messages after local decryption (receiving), and before encryption (sending)
how are they storing the secret keys used for encryption, and what exactly are they doing with it in the code
Any of these questions could reveal problems that would invalidate any security that is added by using the signal protocol. Like if they use an outdated version of the programming library that has a known vulnerability, if they analyze the messages in their plain data form, or on the UI, or the keypresses as you type them, or if they are mishandling your encryption keys by sending them or a part of them to wherever
A big one is when an advert is made to look and feel like organic content. The “Ad” flag (legally required) is in faint small font like someone forced them to have it there.
Dude barged in Lemmy 2 months ago, made 40+ posts with average of 20 comments. I’d consider that performance, translated to Reddit size over 5 years, to earn quite the lower percentile among the posters. So yeah, Reddit is probably sitting on a small fortune thanks to this generous person.
Open source OS everywhere, as many foss apps as possible, no google services, no social media, texting through Signal and Matrix, Librewolf configured to throw away all cookies (exept whitelisted sites).
The first thing that pops up in my mind is your public IPv4. You see, in your home LAN every device uses the same public IPv4 to communicate in the internet. So if one device browses for something like an iPhone and you're being tracked then those ad brokers deliver iPhone ads to this public IPv4 and every device behind this public IPv4 will see those ads. Nobody on the internet knows whether behind this public IPv4 is a single device or a LAN with many devices.
Don’t know if any other browsers do it, but Firefox for desktop added an option when right clicking links to copy without URL tracker. I don’t know if it works on yt links, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
And this is why having true ownership over our own devices is so important, so that they can’t force this on everyone and if they try, we just replace the root certs.
This is why “trusted computing” has been pushed for so long, to remove control from the user specifically to enable bullshit like this
Even if it’s as simple as choosing which Root CA’s we want to trust, how many people will know to do that and be able to do that? A couple percent at most.
Of course we need full ownership of our devices, and trusted computing has always referred to the trust of for-profit corporations, but this in itself doesn’t help the vast majority of people who either don’t know that they’re compromised, think they have nothing to hide, are unable to do anything about it, or a mix of all three.
Privacy and security are already a privilege. Proposals like eIDAS only make it even more unaccessible.
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