Basically title. Looks like wire is now heavily being targeted towards corporates. In a corporate environment you don’t need too much privacy, so I was wondering…
Is wire messenger private in 2023?
Where does it stands in the current stack among WhatsApp, signal, simplex etc…?
Exactly how much data is being collected?
As far as I can tell, wire is fine regarding privacy. All chat content and metadata is end-to-end encrypted. I am not aware of any additional, unnecessary data collection. You can check their privacy policy at https://start.wire.com/privacy-policy
The main reason for concern comes from the wierd, intransparent move of their holdings company to the US in 2019 (see https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/messaging-app-wire-confirms-8-2m-raise-responds-to-privacy-concerns-after-moving-holding-company-to-the-us/ for details)
In 2020 the holdings company moved back to europe and is now located in Germany.
For a comparison with other messengers see https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
I wasn’t able to find technical details regarding the metadata, and was a bit worried about it…
Lile do they know who I message the most, or how much I message them? Is deniability of contact/messages possible?
Full deniability is really difficult. You need to be able to fully trust not only the encryption protocol, but also the company hosting the servers as well as any companies they work with.
The Snowden Leaks as well as the increase in data breaches have shown that that is generally not a good idea.
If you really need deniability I would recommend to look at messengers which do not require any server component and communicate via Tor. One good option might be Briar.
What about simplex? It looks like it uses random message queues for each connection (contact) and once deleted from devices then it doesn’t look likethere is any solid way of identifying if a connection existed…
(NB: simplex don’t have an account for a user in their cloud at all because of how it works so recovery is impossible without latest backups, so that’s a no go for me)
https://www.securemessagingapps.com/
Great comment. Here’s another comparison page for an alternative viewpoint. But yeah wire’s fine
