this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. Are you really arguing privacy here?
I know but your metadata is all they need and cross-referenced with all the other tracking and accounts they have, there's zero privacy left.
Putting on tinfoil hat: or is it e2e encrypted? They hired Moxie to set up the signal protocol but who knows it's still in use since it's closed source? Even if it is still active: what key is used for encryption? Maybe a hard-coded one owned by Meta?
No, I don't really believe that as according to Snowden in his earliest whistle blowing even the NSA is primarily interested in metadata. You can derive pretty much everything from that alone.
Privacy, like security, is about layers. Just because they have your metadata doesn't mean you go ahead and give them everything else.
Fair criticism, I'd recommend either Signal, Matrix, or XMPP over Telegram/Facebook(Meta).
Oversimplifying what actually happens. They can infer what may have happened based on other data points but its not 100% accurate. You can avoid all these metadata issues by not using messengers by Google/Facebook/Meta/Telegram in the first place.
Yes, me too. This whole discussion gave the impression that WhatsApp > Telegram and while this may be true the unfortunately very high adoption of WhatsApp made me argue against it. I'm well aware that Telegram isn't an alternative but the ones you mentioned are (personally I use Signal and even got a significant amount of people convinced to st least run it in parallel).
Succinctly: neither are good options if privacy is a concern for you.
@gravitas_deficiency This is true. That's why I run a private XMPP server in my home for me and my family.