Good thing I never used telegram.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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I don't get it, everyone complained that telegram didn't shared data with law enforcement, now everyone complains that telegram started sharing it
These are 2 distinctly different groups of people.
everyone complained that telegram didn’t shared data
Who complained? All I remember is that their crypto and security sucks and we should stop using it.
My complaint wasn't sharing data with law enforcement. It was more about whether or not they should be moderating their platform and banning accounts that intentionally violate the policy. I don't necessarily have a problem with them sharing information with the police when it's warranted and there is a credible threat, because nobody should be using something to plan to bomb a restaurant or sports game. But the arguments that I have seen (and made) were pretty much "yeah, you shouldn't be allowed to plan to kill people on this platform with no moderation, especially when the chats aren't even encrypted".
Even back when the CEO got arrested most of Lemmy was crying foul on that and a lot of comments I saw got downvoted for siding with the 'police state ".
Only thing I use it for is bots. If they want to know when someone is in my foyer, that’s fine.
Element.io ~
Better, but still not great, because a lot of metadata gets collected even if the conversations themselves do not. Might I suggest SimpleX instead?
I actually tried SimpleX because of this person..
SimpleX gets a lot of things right. In particular:
- no public identifiers
- ability to chat anonymously
- not dependent on centralized servers
- multiple user profiles
My main concern for them is that they are backed by several investors (some VCs) with no concrete public plan as to how to pay them back.
Oh, nice. Whatever works.
Im pretty sure matrix.org data has been and will be sharing data with law enforcement. Even if you use encryption, they collect loads of metadata. With smaller servers it depends on local jurisdiction i guess.
Of course they will. They only company that has actually ever refused, to my knowledge, is lavabit, and that's because they shut down their operations entirely when the gov demanded encryption keys due to Snowden.
The fact that such an enormous portion of users and groups are on the matrix.org server is a huge problem.
You don't have to be "pretty sure", you can just read their law enforcement policies here.
They're not, nor have they ever been, a group of folk trying to hide from governments/LE: they're a legal company headquartered in the UK, and are bound by its laws.
Having said that, they're also historically against the UK Government's attempts at instilling things like encryption backdoors.
If you're still paranoid, host your own server; you can still use Element (the client hosted at Element.io) to access it.
Threema is also really good, and they're very close to the full release of the desktop app.
I really want to like it, but from a technical perspective, it just doesn't work well tbh.
What's issue do you see with it? It's cryptographically secure and has been audited. The fact that it's centralized doesn't really matter.
I meant from a user perspective. Sending images doesn't work half of the time, the search is completely useless if you have tens of thousands of messages etc. I use it every day btw.
If you'd like you can contact me on my Threema ID at 6CH24JJE so we can troubleshoot this in my group on Threema.
Your experience with threema is... weird? For me both of those things work perfectly. Much better than Element, for example.
It's a shame, it was a good app but if you haven't bailed already now is as good a time as any.
If you're using encryption you probably don't have much to worry about. The main problem is so many people don't bother to encrypt their chats and make the assumption that their chats are encrypted. Yes, I think the default should be encryption turned on. But I also think this is user error, so.
Aren't group chats unencrypted by design, with no option to encrypt? (I don't know, I don't use the app. Just something I vaguely recall somebody saying.)
No. You have to enable encryption individually. And it only works if everyone in the conversation has enabled encryption. But it is available.