this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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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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I've been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.

I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It's all open source too on GitHub.

Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.

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[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

With an FPGA or special CPU instruction set, the encryption algorithms could run on a toaster—which would give access to whatever low-spec handheld you wanted without making it chug to have strong encryption. That also still isn’t covering the future hope of a Linux phone, or someone that just wants to register an account on their laptop.

Using forks puts stress on other teams to keep up with breaking changes, & 90%+ of folks won’t be looking for forks or be willing to trust their unofficial status. I saw the code for UnifiedPush as a Mattermost plugin & it was like 50 lines or something small which is much less than the rest while allowing users to keep control of their metadata which is a big deal if you care about privacy. A fork for SMS support would encounter similar issues, & now you either need to compete with Molly or copy its featureset otherwise users have to choose, SMS or UnifiedPush. That said, I agree with the SMS situation since it was easy to convince relatives to use this new “text app” where encryption magically came to a chunk of their contact list.

Saying emoji was the most important was tongue-in-cheek, but it makes the application feel non-native (& I think Apple’s emoji are particularly ugly). You would think at least the Google set was shipped to Android, or—now hear me out—not ship emoji, don’t override the user experience, let the user’s fontconfig display the one they set. Shipping a whole font (or images) for emoji is why the application size is so bloated for a chat app.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The first two arguments I get. But the emoji argument about not shipping them at all? Yeah if this is going to be a mainstream and easy to use app then that won't fly. My friends, family, and I all use emojis, gifs, and stickers. I'm sure many people enjoy these things as well. All that bloat.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago

Are you using a device without an emoji font installed on the system at all? The web works just fine without browsers shipping an emoji font.