cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/20989376
Where Soatok goes over why checklists are meaningless when trying to figure out if something is private or just for comparisons in general.
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More of a rant. Post is kind of nuts. They are talking about a comparison matrix not a check list. How else are you going to compare.
The point is that people interested in privacy and security shouldn’t pay attention to such shallow ‘privacy’ recommendations but should actually do their best to understand things and read writeups etc.
Tables are a great starting point. So is something like alternativeto.net and just go down through the list by popularity until you get to something sane.
There is also going to be disagreements about what is best. There is no best app. We all have unique needs and concerns. I know I disagree with many things Op said in such an absolute way.
Users shouldn’t have to care about jurisdiction if the servers cannot ever read their messages in the first place. Any app that fails to meet this requirement should wholesale be disqualified.
What madness is this? Surely this is not about the servers reading a message, but about the user having or not having legal recourse against a server abusing whatever it is they can read. Metadata is data. Someone somewhere will know how much and when and in which patterns I communicate with who. And how much control I have over what they do with that knowledge simply depends on the jurisdiction. Technical considerations are irrelevant for that 🤷
That’s both fair and not fair. I think Signal shows how to do privacy correctly by having pretty much no metadata to give. Most other messengers cannot say the same.
But yes, having some kind of legal recourse is important too.
