How about we just do away with unencrypted messaging all-together?
Showed this information to my boomer mother who then asked my also tech illiterate step father what he thought.
“We don’t send sensitive information through texts.”
The ignorance almost physically hurts… Thinking that only the actual message content is important.
Or ignoring the pictures we send and the private things I talk about with my mom.
Do I think that specifically my information would be useful to China? Likely not. But I also have no idea what all is possible with that kind of information in the aggregate.
At the very least, I assume they will use it to manipulate us even more with disinformation.
Easier, imagine half the strangers you’ve met during the day reading your messages aloud with orcish laughs and judging the pictures.
Messages between two Apple devices are safe, and messages between two Android devices are safe, but messages between an Apple device and and Android device are vulnerable.
This is not very accurate. Some Android devices come with Google Messages, which will use Google’s encrypted version of RCS if the carrier supports it. People who don’t know what all of that means should not assume their messages are encrypted.
Anyone know if Google Voice is encrypted? I can read copies of my texts online so I’m thinking no. I’ve felt like the service has outlived its usefulness for me and that would be the final straw.
I see no reason to believe that it is.
I find it useful when outside the USA to be able to communicate with American luddites who refuse to install messaging apps.
I’m actually really not concerned about foreign governments spying on me but I am bothered by my own government, the guys with the guns who can arrest me, doing it.
Tho I suspect if the government is recommending ways to avoid messages being intercepted, they’ve already cracked how to intercept them.
What’s rich is the FBI promoting WhatsApp. Yeah, not a fucking chance.
Use Signal or XMPP+OMEMO or anything else.
Mandate social media to expose an open API and use the chat function with an OTR plugin.
The solutions are all old.
It’s just interesting how it all went from promotion of corporate surveillance to comms protection when supposed corporate shills won the election.
That article may as well be sponsored by WhatsApp. Zero direct mentions of Signal, but tons pushing people to WhatsApp. That’s a bit disappointing.Edit: I was wrong, it does talk about Signal as well.
The second half of the article is about Signal.
It sucks they mention WhatsApp first, but I think the bigger omission is that they don’t mention non-US entities or anything you can self-host and federate like Matrix.
Matrix isn’t super private though. It’s halfway there, but compared to something like XMPP, it falls short due to the fact that any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata, and the server operator can do whatever they want with it. So all you would have to do is spin up a new host, message a target user and get them to respond, and you’re done.
any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata,
No, it does not. Instances get metadata for rooms in which they participate, not all of a user’s metadata.
And when chatting with someone on Matrix like you would with text messaging, only your instance and the one your contact uses are involved. Just like any other service, including XMPP.
Oh, fair enough then!
ETA: Yes, the lack of mentions of Matrix, etc are a bit disappointing. But I think Matrix is waaay outside their target democratic.
Their target democratic is still in the matrix.
Yeeahhh, they’re talking to like Grandma who barely knows what a text message is
Signal or WIRE.
When the article about end to end user encryption messaging platforms mentions neither I have to question why it’s even an article.
Signal or WIRE.
It does mention Signal lower down the article
