this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
352 points (97.6% liked)
Privacy
31900 readers
476 users here now
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 :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I believe WhatsApp uses the same protocol (or at least the same crypto algorithms), though I'm not sure if they were involved in its development.
Good point on the metadata. Signal has the "sealed sender" thing, which (I think) helps with the metadata problem somewhat.
Metadata and the comm endpoints is one of the hardest parts to deal with. If an intermediary doesn't have a pointer to a destination then delivering a message becomes problematic, envelopes without an address tend to sit in bins. It would be possible to simply store messages and allow recipients to poll for them but that gets really inefficient at scale. Plus it creates a central repo where messages sit until retrieved which is a liability in itself.
Things like OTR encryption are interesting as a transient system ad-hoc type encryption for things that don't need or even want absolute assurance of identity, but if I want to talk to Alice and be sure it's not Eve then it's not ideal.