Hello. I am looking for an alternative to Telegram and I prefer an application that uses decentralised servers. My question is: why is the xmpp+omemo protocol not recommended on websites when it is open source and decentralised? The privacyguides.org website does not list xmpp+omemo as a recommended messaging service. Nor does this website include it in its comparison of private messaging services.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/assets/img/cover/real-time-communication.webp
Why do you think xmpp and its messaging clients such as Conversations, Movim, Gajim, etc. do not appear in these guides?
The “privacy, not anonymity” dichotomy is some weird meme that I’ve seen spreading in privacy discourse in the last few years. Why would you not care about metadata privacy if you care about privacy?
Signal is not awesome for metadata privacy, and metadata is the most valuable data for governments and corporations alike. Why do you think Facebook enabled e2ee after they bought WhatsApp? They bought it for the metadata, not the message content.
Signal pretends to mitigate the problem it created by using phone numbers and centralizing everyone’s metadata on AWS, but if you think about it for just a moment (see linked comment) the cryptography they use for that doesn’t actually negate its users’ total reliance on the server being honest and following their stated policies.
Signal is a treasure-trove of metadata of activists and other privacy-seeking people, and the fact that they invented and advertise their “sealed-sender” nonsense to pretend to blind themselves to it is an indicator that this data is actually being exploited: Signal doth protest too much, so to speak.
@cypherpunks @theherk
In most countries, sharing your phone number is equivalent of sharing you full home address. It would be great to see how people would react if instead of providing their number for an account registration, they were asked to give their home address.
I Facebook said they enabled E2EE, theres zero evidence and zero way to verify that. Facebook has been caught in lie after lie. They most likely lied about that too.
Many people have reverse-engineered and analyzed whatsapp; it’s clear that they are actually doing e2ee. It is not certain that they don’t have ways to bypass it for targeted users, and there is currently a lawsuit alleging that they do, but afaik no evidence has been presented yet.
I personally wouldn’t consider it E2EE if they can easily bypass it, which all logic would dictate they can. Your message isn’t going to be picked up by a 3rd party, but if a techno-fascist corporation in league with a rouge fascist state can read it, then its not secure at all.
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m certainly not advocating for using WhatsApp or any other proprietary, centralized, or Facebook-operated communication systems 😂
But I do think Facebook probably really actually isn’t exploiting the content of the vast majority of whatsapp traffic (even if they do turn out to be able to exploit it for any specific users at any time, which i wouldn’t be surprised by).
Like I said, Facebook is actively in cahoots with Trumps fascist agenda. I fully believe if you live in America at least they are using your chat history to build a profile on you for Palantir’s surveillance system. Like you said, there is no hard evidence for it, but based on their history, their lack of morals, their zero ethical standards, and the lack of legal repercussions for anything big tech does, you’d have to be a fool to trust any software they’ve developed.