Privacy Guides

not sure if it would be privacy conscience to share credentials for all of these different apps.

No, it would not.

Their privacy policy lists what they collect, and it's a fairly large amount of stuff.

Copy/paste from their site:

What data does Beeper collect?

In order to provide the service, Beeper collects device information, including OS, hardware, public IP addresses, network routing information, information on the installed Beeper client, and other device settings. Beeper also uses user account information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, to authenticate users to their accounts.

See our Privacy Policy for more details on how we collect and use personal information.

Now, that isn't exactly what I'd call privacy friendly. However, for something like Facebook messenger, it isn't any worse.

I intend to at least try it out if they ever send me the damn email to let me use it at all lol. But that's primarily to see how it interacts with imessage for the folks I know that use that. I'm not going into it hoping for security, since they dick around with encryption in a way that breaks it.

While beeper service itself is extremely convenient, I personally would never use it for anything sensitive. Do note though that all of their connections to services are open source and relatively easy to set up (with the exception of imessage) on your own matrix homeserver to improve privacy

While I can't comment on the beeper side of things, I did look into matrix and bridges a bit.

From what I understand, for all e2ee services you use through beeper (and matrix in general), all messages get sent to the server encrypted by matrix, then the server decrypts them and they get re-encrypted in a different protocol (ie. WhatsApp/Signal/...) and then the encrypted message goes out to whatever service.

This would mean that technically the matrix server is able to read all your messages.

This is my main reason for still using the native apps for encrypted services. For unencrypted services I use a my own matrix server with bridges.

Been using this for about a month now.

Depends on which service you're looking at.

If you use it with Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp, it's probably more secure, as it's the only way I know of to get messages without having the spyware app installed on your device.

If you use it with Signal, Beeper (Matrix) will log of a bunch of metadata that Signal will not.

I was not able to get iMessage working, and had a couple of services that I was repeatedly logged out of for reasons I can't explain.

The problem with apps like this is that they're designed to make third party services do things those parties don't want you doing. And ultimately those third parties are the ones in control. All they have to do is change 1 line of code to break your shit. And then the developer has to fix it, and it becomes this constant whackamole game, and meanwhile you're missing your notifications/messages.

I quite like it, though I wouldnt share anything private using it as I think they can store any messages that goes through the linked services, and as another comment mentionned, if they ever get bought out, they could decide this data is theirs and to do bad stuff with it

I've seen others say chat messages have been viewed by the beeper platform, so security is something I think is worth thinking about. In other words, SocialSmartly is a great substitute for Beeper. Why not try it?