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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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If it ask for your phone number its not private. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago by lunatique@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Nowadays, a majority of apps require you to sign up with your email or even worse your phone number. If you have a phone number attached to your name, meaning you went to a cell service/phone provider, and you gave them your ID, then no matter what app you use, no matter how private it says it is, it is not private. There is NO exception to this. Your identity is instantly tied to that account.

Signal is not private. I recommend Simplex or another peer to peer onion messaging app. They don't require email or phone number. So as long as you protect your IP you are anonymous

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[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Email is a very different thing.

You can't protect against emails being received in plain text.

Don't know the technicalities of the specific case you are referencing, but I know that if the government wants to they can middleman any received email before the provider can encrypt it for storage on their servers (by forcing the provider to let them).

On the other hand, if you use an end to end encrypted chat app, you can't middleman any messages from the providers side by force because the messages are always encrypted on the users device before being sent.

[–] unexpected@forum.guncadindex.com 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I don't know about lavabit specifically, but typically encrypted emails are encrypted on your client computer and decrypted on the recipient's computer. It is conceptually the same thing as an "end to end encrypted chat app".... just in email form.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Yes that works if both the sender and receiever encrypt the emails before sending them.

I specifically mentioned incoming plaintext (unencrypted) email.

Since mail is technically decentralised, not everyone is using protonmail for example, so protonmail can only perform e2e encryption on protonmail to protonmail email sending (they let you encrypt mail to people outside but it's not as seamless).

Nevertheless, I was mentioning incoming plaintext emails, which email providers have to encrypt before storing. The government can middleman that procedure and read the incoming mail before it's encrypted by your provider (protonmail, etc).

(This is one of the reasons why lavabit may have shutdown, you can't protect against incoming plaintext mail)