this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
28 points (91.2% liked)
Privacy
31960 readers
672 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
deleted
The "truly private" req really smells with "I have no threat model and don't know what am I doing"
Yeah. What does privacy mean?
Does it mean nobody knows what you're saying? Doesn't mean nobody knows that you're talking? Doesn't mean nobody can tell two people have engaged in a conversation?
In addition to direct observations, you can make indirect inferences from many of those characteristics.
If I can observe your peer to peer traffic I know who's talking to who.
If I can observe your network, onion routing layer, I can determine who is talking to who with high probability
If I can see network traffic at all, I can determine who our members of a group, if the group messages are delivered simultaneously.
theres also notification scandal recently which i think the op doesnt know about
It was always known, in the threat model.
Though I think everyone assumed Google required a warrant.
Even without Google, Apple's participation and push notifications - signal still has the same capability. Simply because they've created a centralized architecture.
Anyway on Windows, Apple there is no sense to have a privacy apps if the OS it self pump everything it can.
And on Android it only make sense if you use an AOSP rom, or another but without the google crapware..
If you allow for servers that can't read your messages (Tor nodes and such), "serverless" messaging is quite possible. All the layers of encryption and redirection aren't great for latency, but there's no reason two phones can't be connected over Tor/Veilid.
The problem in practice, I think, is notifications. To receive notifications, you need to be online all the time. To be available on Tor all the time may help deanonimze you so you also need to shake up your connections every now and then, which requires some CPU heavy recalculations and key exchange from the network as connections are reestablished.
deleted