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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Signal Founder Moxie Marlinspike: Telegram is not private. There is nothing private about it. They've done a really amazing job of convincing the world that this is an encrypted messaging app (cdn.imgchest.com)

submitted 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) by Wudi@feddit.uk to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”

“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”

" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"

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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

There’s no such social graph to speak of. Signal does not know who is speaking to whom.

The only people who know this are people operating the server. Period.

Three-letter agencies have served them legal subpoenas many many times and they never turn over anything more than the above information.

See the link I provided above.

Filter for…what, exactly? The hundreds of millions of people who value private and secure communications?

Yup, that's precisely what it's a filter for.

We do, because they publish them publicly.

Trust me bro is not a viable model for anybody who actually gives a shit about their privacy.

The reality of the situation is that Signal asks users for information it has no business collecting during the sign up process, and this information can be used in adversarial ways against the users. People using Signal are making a faith based judgment to trust the operators of this server.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org -2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The only people who know this are people operating the server.

We all know this, for reasons I've already stated.

See the link I provided above.

Your link is broken.

Yup, that's precisely what it's a filter for.

100M people is not a filter...

Trust me bro is not a viable model

No one said anything about that? That is not the model.

The reality of the situation is that Signal asks users for information it has no business collecting

The business is connecting users. It's one of the reasons it is the most viable private and secure chat platform. It's why I have a dozen connections on Signal and literally 0 on every other platform. Because you actually know who's using it. You can have the most private and secure messaging system in the world but if you can't use it to actually chat with anyone, then what good is it?

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 3 points 36 minutes ago

No, we don't all know this. What we actually know that people like you say this and expect the rest of us to trust you blindly, which is itself concerning.

Your link is broken.

Your browser plugins are broken, the link is fine. That said, here's non archived version https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/15/faq-data-subpoena-investigation/

100M people is not a filter…

Given world population and modern data analysis capabilities it absolutely is.

No one said anything about that? That is not the model.

That's literally the model. Signal asks you for your phone number when you register, what happens with that information after that is only known to people operating the server. Let me know what part of that you're still struggling to understand.

The business is connecting users. It’s one of the reasons it is the most viable private and secure chat platform. It’s why I have a dozen connections on Signal and literally 0 on every other platform. Because you actually know who’s using it.

That word salad has fuck all to do with the point I made, which once again, is that you have to trust people who operate the server in how they handle this information.

You can have the most private and secure messaging system in the world but if you can’t use it to actually chat with anyone, then what good is it?

Ah yes, because there's absolutely no conceivable way to verify whom you're connecting with aside from sharing your phone number with an American company. You couldn't possibly use any out of band channel to verify who the person you're communicating with is.