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.

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Privacy minded instant messaging quest. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi,

I'm looking for an instant messaging ( IM ) ~~apps~~ software/protocol that run on Android and computer

and meet the following requirements :

Open source !
E2EE
Messages are send in direct ! (not passing by a server)
handle group
Truly private ! ( That's the tricky part )

The closest that I've found is Briar

+can work without internet ! (bluetooth, local wifi, files !)
+ use TOR
- Mutual party have to exchange key (or your can introduce someone)
- sending media suck for now, poor image quality
- no call or voice messaging

I've been looking for alternatives:

~~Session~~
- Sadly it keep ALL the conversation into server !!! so it's a no go.
speek
- I didn't try it yet, any feedback ?
simplex
- it look very promising ! (didn't tried it yet)
- + seem to handle multiple profile in one !
- + do not require that both party send an invitation !
  - and have also a optional long term address
- ~~! I didn't found (yet) if the messages are send in direct or pass by a server..~~
  It's not P2P all the messages pass by servers.. too bad.

All post about alternatives or experience with the one that I cited are welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Direct peer-to-peer connections giveaway your IP address to the person you're communicating with. Meaning anybody observing the network can see two people are specifically communicating with each other. Briar attempts to get around this by using Tor to obscure it.

But briar is using Tor as a relay, just like simple x does. The architectures are very similar from that lens.

To your threat model, ideally data does not rest on the network, but you have to assume any data that hits the network is being recorded by a bad actor to be analyzed later.