How the fuck is Telegram after WhatsApp?? Telegram has some of the worst privacy while WhatsApp is at least end to end encrypted.
USA, Germany, Russia, Iran, China, Brazil, and other have tried to or have banned Telegram at various points of time in the past decade because of their concern they can’t access Telegram data. You can’t say the same for WhatsApp. That suggests WhatsApp isn’t as secure as they say.
That logic is bogus. I can’t say the same about WhatsApp because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. They can’t give you any message data because they literally don’t own it.
Telegram, on the other hand, does have all the messages. They just refuse to give it to authorities. But they could change that at any point and just start giving the data, while in WhatsApp, that’s not possible by design.
Telegram has open source clients and protocol specifications. Whatsapp is a piece of proprietary bullshit that you can’t even use without a phone and zuck will sue you for even trying to decomple it
I am not a big WhatsApp fan, Signal and Matrix are clearly better from a privacy perspective, e.g. because of the meta data.
And while it’s true what you wrote, it still doesn’t explain my question / counter my argument. WhatsApp is, no matter how much I disliked Facebook / Meta, having better privacy. All messages are end-to-end encrypted and can’t be returned to anyone, while most chats in Telegram aren’t end-to-end encrypted. Telegram often doesn’t give out any chats, but they are capable of doing so and could change their policies at any time.
Telegram’s secret chats are e2e encrypted as well. They’re not the default option because it’s their way of balancing between being a messenger for privacy nuts and a social network with huge channels full of media at the same time.
Comparing the end-to-end chats, I straight up don’t trust WhatsApp, it could send my messages straight to Zuck as far as I’m concerned. Given how many reverse engineering projects got closed after a cease and desist letter from them, I suspect a great deal of security by obscurity. While Telegram isn’t much better with it’s ridiculously convoluted code, it’s inviting people to check and they have verifiable builds, that means that they are at least confident in what they are doing.
As for Signal and Matrix, I don’t know a single person who uses either, so for me Telegram is the best middle ground for my normie purposes
WhatsApp is at least end to end encrypted
Just because it tells you it is doesn’t mean it is
What a bunch of bullshit.
I self-host my stuff because it’s cheaper, I run Gentoo since the last 15 years and use Chrome because it’s just better and friendly. I also have a Xperia android phone and really, really don’t like MKBHD.
MKBHD
I had to look up what that even was… but I use something from each panel: I work in software with websites & apps, so I have all the browsers and OSs …
I’m somewhat curious as to whether you plan to switch to another browser when Google finally pushes Manifest v3 and/or Web Integrity API
I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen. Most probable outcome is I’ll run two different browsers based on what works for me. I stopped acting “ethical” about computing a long time ago, with some small exceptions. I’m not here on Lemmy because ethics, but because I’m fucking pissed at Reddit.
Conservative is the wrong word there
Not really. People who use the apps are trying to preserve (conserve) the time when privacy wasn’t an afterthought. It’s not working, but they’re sure trying.
What I mean is that privacy is no longer mainstream. The software shown does work but the majority of people don’t use it or don’t even know what it is.
Isn’t tor like compromised? And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
> Isn’t tor like compromised?
Most people who got caught on Tor were caught by undercover operatives or one of their friends on there got busted. Just general recklessness on there. I have heard that CIA tries to run a bunch of tor nodes to deanonymize tor but I’ve also heard that tor checks if those nodes are legit before allowing them on. I don’t see strong evidence for tor being compromised.
> And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Privacy based solutions is kind of vague, the main privacy and security services I use are Signal, Protonmail, Protonvpn, and Bitwarden. All of these are open source, you can view the source code yourself and see if there’s spyware, strangers look at the code all the time so online strangers can see if there’s spyware in there, they also are all checked and audited by third parties. So the code you see is what you get and there are no backdoors or spyware running in there. You can build it all from source if you’re extra cautious but it’s probably done right.
So I have no idea what this guy is saying but it is not true at all.
I feel like WhatsApp should be in the middle. The app is terrible, but the messaging is actually encrypted. We paranoids also appreciate Signal, and Element disappointingly gets no play here.
Also:
*believes not every company is inherently evil*
It’s kind of weird, then, how they all end up doing evil stuff, including the guys that explicitly set out with the philosophy “don’t be evil”.
We can all tell conservative is supposed to be the enlightened one, but unless the creator is using a very malice-driven definition of evil (as opposed to including accidental evil) this line is an own-goal.
Do you think Whatsapp is actually encrypted and isn’t a tool to get more information from its users because Meta pinky promised? Closed source piece of garbage.
Open Whisper did the actual message algorithm, and I understand it’s open source. It could be copying your messages at the endpoint, I guess, but nobody has caught it doing that on wireshark to date.
I do trust Open Whisper and their open source project as well. I also trust Meta to do everything possible to collect even the slightest bit of data possible. Plus as Whatsapp is completely proprietary we don’t know how the solution from Open Whisper was integrated. Why not open source it like Signal does?
actually encrypted
Last time I checked (which has been a while admittedly) they used their central server for key exchange, meaning the whole encryption is compromised.
I know it was bullshit when it first launched, but they completely rebuilt the message protocol later on. Shit, now you’ve got me worried, time to do research.
Edit: Nah, it looks like it uses a perfectly valid key exchange algorithm. Maybe it goes via a WhatsApp server, but you shouldn’t care because the algorithm is interception-proof.
Last I read, you can’t use WhatsApp without sharing your contacts. This helps Meta build its shadow profiles and keep tabs on folks not even using it. The metadata is also often just as valuable as the actual contents.
But eventually the “you’re the product” instance will dawn on ya.
Last I read, you can’t use WhatsApp without sharing your contacts. This helps Meta build its shadow profiles and keep tabs on folks not even using it. The metadata is also often just as valuable as the actual contents.
That’s correct. When I use it (family is on it and it beats no encryption) I sandbox it, that’s part of the app being terrible.
Fuck anything created by Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp. Actually, I’d be willing to bet real money that is the case, if there was any way to actually resolve that bet.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp.
Literally not possible, from what I’ve read of the scheme involved. I haven’t looked over it myself but I trust Open Whisper.
