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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It’s soul vs soulless, not clunky vs robust. The modern Internet is arguably much more robust and secure, but the internet of yesteryear was actually pleasant to use, even if it was more prone to random crap going wrong. Each website had a unique look and feel, and things were less predatory. There wasn’t as much of an arms race between companies to control every second of your attention, because they don’t know yet how to harvest data generated by your usage meaningfully.




  • 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.



  • As the other commenter mentioned, your best bet is being selective about which services you use to communicate.

    Unencrypted (plain text) is the worst, since data is easy for a third party to sniff (think of it as a wiretap). For example, HTTP and SMS are unencrypted.

    Encrypted is a good start, since third parties can’t sniff your traffic, but the server handling your communications can usually see everything that passes through it. For example, HTTPS is an SSL-encrypted variant of HTTP, and services like Facebook messenger are encrypted, but Facebook can still see all of your messages, since it’s stored on their servers.

    End to End Encrypted (E2EE) is the golden standard. Only the endpoints (i.e. you and your friend) can see the content of your messages, and all traffic is encrypted in a way that even the server cannot view it. Signal is end to end encrypted, as are many other modern messaging platforms (WhatsApp is E2EE in theory, as is Google Meet, but we can’t verify this ourselves).