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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Instant Messengers Analysis and Comparison (privacy.awiki.org)

submitted 1 year ago by sir_reginald@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The table is quite big (190+ lines of hand-written HTML) and it doesn't fit on mobile phone screens unless you zoom out. It should be fine on desktop. It also specifies the criteria followed and has analysis of some of the IMs in the table (not close to all of them, I hope to add more analysis in the future).

Counter-arguments are always welcome. Sources and additional information too. Note that the typical privacy recommendation (Signal) is not recommended here. It does not meet our criteria, being centralized and requiring a phone number. I don't want to hate on Signal since it's doing a decent job spreading the importance of E2EE, however we can not recommend it for the given reasons.

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[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's why I recommend XMPP.

As of why multi-device sync isn't a core feature is due to the inherent nature of the SimpleX protocol that everything is stored locally, servers are only relays and do not store nothing more than heavily encrypted packages that only contains messages and once they are delivered, they are immediately removed. Servers do not store any information, they don't have your contacts, nor any form of unique identification for your account. You might even change the relay you're using every 5 minutes, because you aren't tied to them.

Compare that with XMPP where you're hosted in one server and all your messages and conversations go to that single server. Your server also stores your contact list for multi-device sync and because you're always using the same server for that account, it will work seamlessly. In SimpleX, your account information never leaves your device.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Syncing between clients is still possible, although it may not be implemented. There's no reason why a P2P client that's part of a conversation can't request past messages from any other client that's part of that conversation. All P2P does is move the data handling to the edge.

This is what I was implying: if a chat design doesn't account for this, it's IMHO not a good useful design - especially in the case that the design also leaks some metadata, and so isn't 100% targetted at dissidents.

P.s. I'm going to write my own chat application, with blackjack, and hookers.