this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
665 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
60082 readers
4789 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Group chats in RCS weren’t even end-to-end encrypted on Android until August of this year. Green texts are a security risk.
If you're that concerned with security, shouldn't you be using Signal and try to convince others to do so? iMessage is E2E encrypted but Signal is platform-agnostic and has better security/privacy.
I don’t care but you have to convince Apple. People really pile on for the most trivial of comments.
I can't speak for the others, but I'm just curious as to why iMessage's quirks are heavily put up with. With the options of messaging apps nowadays, the "green bubble" stuff seems like an arbitrary problem.
Sure, it's stock software, but plenty are willing to switch off Edge/Safari for Chromium browsers. I understand that there's strong social pressure to conform to using the same messaging service. I think it's something that can be worked around with any proficiency with tech, along with a good argument to the social circle. I managed to get off Messenger this way and it worked great.
Personally I'd rather find the best message service than use what everyone else uses, but that's just me. It's not a big problem at the end of the day, really. People value different things with their tech, and that's fine.
Network effect. It’s easier to convince the one green text to switch than to convince everyone to switch to an alternative. Even in my one immediate family we only have one Android. As a result we have two group threads, one of which excludes that number so images and videos will go through at full quality. Message is the default so people use it. I’m aware that’s not the case in other countries.
Okay so now that it has encryption, what is the security risk?
😂, a security risk 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Are you Edward Snowden that you think it's such a massive risk?
You are delusional. I use text messages all the time and there is zero risk.
Is there zero risk or do you think there is zero risk? Text messages can absolutely be intercepted by your service provider
Don't you think you're a bit paranoid? Does the service provider care to know that you sent a message to your friend saying "great party last"? Or to your wife, "pick up bread and milk please"?
I'm quite sure they are not wasting their time doing that.
If what you need to say is so secret, you should not be using iMessage, SMS or WhatsApp but something stronger like Signal, Matrix etc
I don't think it's paranoid to not want any intermediary to know what you're talking about, even if all you're talking about is innocuous things like groceries.
Besides, they don't have to "waste time" on anything. They've got computers to collect it all.
Of course, like you said, Signal or Matrix are potential solutions for that, but you still need to get both sides to agree on using them. SMS have the advantage that everyone has a phone number and can thus use them. Upgrading to RCS will secure this insecure-yet-very-popular medium.
I understand that but as we know from Edward Snowden, the CIA literally have direct server access to all of Apple servers, Google servers, Amazon servers and Microsoft servers to name a few.
So they can just log in and view your iMessages at anytime. Or have the system collect them. This was part of the Patriot Act that requires the tech companies to make sure the government can view all of this at any time to identify terrorists.
That means the server definitely has the encryption key to your conversations. However you are protected from having a snooper snoop your line using snoop tools because the connection to the server is encrypted