Privacy

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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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A question about secure chats (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 11 months ago by Thisfox@sopuli.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Two questions.

My family insist on using Whatsapp for the family chats. I have to keep a copy on a device just so I can communicate with them. I do so under protest, as I was always told it isn't secure. My brother has just said

"oh Whatsapp is encrypted, it's perfectly secure".

First, is it actually as encrypted and safe as my brother claims? That would solve everything.

Second, if it isn't, where can I get some proof that we should switch to Telegram or whatever? Proof which doesn't make me look like a raving loony?

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 87 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

My understanding is that it IS encrypted, and its supposed to use the Signal protocol (Signal developed it and released it for others to use)

The problems are with

metadata (like the other comment explained)
closed source, so we take their word on it for how it works. It's possible they're being misleading or doing something shady

See this image from a few years ago:

Note that signal does require this, which isn't in the chart:

phone number (for now)
last active date
sign up date (I think)

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

iMessage definitely has more hooks in than those listed. It’s an integral Apple service that’s hooked into your deeper iCloud account. And because of that, they know a lot more than just a mere “chat” app would get access to. Which likely makes it harder to quantify.

Moreover, Meta and Alphabet also cross reference a lot of data points from all the other sources they have (cookies, IP logs, etc.). Again making actual data points fuzzy or incomplete.

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