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Privacy @lemmy.ml

Albin Jose @kerala.party

2y ago

Which one do you trust the most for your privacy?

Privacy Guides @lemmy.one

Which one do you trust the most for your privacy?

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84 comments

Signal. This isn't even up for discussion.
- Uhm, yeah why are we even comparing the two? Definitely isn't a discussion. Signal is superior

Signal seems like an obvious choice over Telegram if privacy is the exclusive priority.
I do love Telegram tho for the ability to send full-quality photos/videos, log-on with 2+ phones simultaneously, visual customization, etc

🤔
both require phone numbers, and both concentrate metadata in a central location (Amazon servers, in the case of signal).
both sort of pretend to be free open source software, and sort of are but with a lot of caveats.
telegram doesn't even have end-to-end encryption (except for some wacky not-peer-reviewed thing in 1:1 'secret chats' which are rarely used); at least signal has it beat there.
https://simplex.chat/ is a new messenger which doesn't have any of the above problems and seems quite promising imo.
- Hey fellow SimpleX enjoyer. It's still very early but only by spreading the word we can inform people about this great alternative!
  
  Did chatgpt write this?
- Telegram probably doesn’t have E2E so that people can have always active desktop sessions
  
  I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "always active desktop sessions" but for any definition I could imagine it is possible to do that while having e2ee. Many e2ee messengers have multi-device support nowadays.
  Telegram doesn't need to have e2ee because they've pulled some trick of becoming widely perceived as being privacy friendly despite not actually offering any e2ee in most cases, and offering only some 🤡-protocol in the few cases where they do.
  Another reason for them not to implement e2ee is that they're most likely monetizing their users content data as well as the metadata (and in more ways than just charging some types of police for access to it, which is presumably only a small fraction of their revenue).
  
  E2ee doesn't have to be 2 devices. It can be for any amount of endpoints as long as they have the key to decrypt the data.
  For example my nextcloud instance has e2ee for my phone, computer, and tablet.
- Signal doesn't keep metadata at all.
  
  They say that they don't, and I think it is extremely likely that Signal employees are entirely sincere when they say that.
  But, even if they truly don't keep metadata, they can't actually know what their hosting provider (Amazon) is doing. And, their cryptographic "sealed sender" thing doesn't really solve the problem. If someone with the right access at Amazon really wants the Signal metadata, they can get it, and if they can, anybody who can coerce, compel, or otherwise compromise those people (or their computers) can get it too.
  One can say they're confident that the kind of adversaries they care to protect against don't have that kind of capability, but it isn't reasonable to say that Signal's no-logging policy protects metadata without adding the caveat that routing all the traffic through Amazon makes the metadata of the protocol's entire userbase available in a single place for the kind of adversaries that do.

Why make this post hard to search for by using an image, instead of directly asking which is more trustworthy between Telegram and Signal? It just makes it look like you're sharing an article link.
The question isn't even really relevant, you can mistrust Signal and still use it because it's made in such a way that even if the server operators were malicious, they could get little data out of you.
Telegram has secret chats and already having to "toggle-on" your privacy undermines the privacy of the whole application because your profile is partially clear to the service, which leaves it open to make various inferences on you
- I’m still not sure whether the post is just spam.
  
  I have this impression too with the profile's posts, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt
- Yeah it took me a while to figure out it was about those two apps. I thought OP meant any app.
  
  That wasn't very programming.dev of you

For people I don't know or just started talking, I give them my telegram username that's not linked to my personal phone number. For friends and family, I use signal.
Lots of opensource projects have telegram channels for updates. Not to mention news and local updates as well.
People need to incorporate a social aspect of the real world. Everyone isn't as privacy conscious as you are and you can have multiple apps for different scenarios.
If you don't ever want to meet anyone new, signal is perfect.

I wish we would move away from centralized messengers entirely. They are always just one law away from being banned. See: whatever the UK is doing.

Using signal but planning to switch. SimpleX and XMPP are my candidates.

Signal is privacy focused Telegram is a privacy nightmare

Signal hands down

I use Signal, it's about as private as I can get other normal people to use.

I ”trust” Signal the most because there is 100% transparency, I can look into the inner workings of the app and see what it does at all time.
Telegram is the best (in sense of privacy) message app you can actually manage to get your friends and family to use.

Session
XMPP with OMEMO
a Tox, if possible (no real asynch common)
Matrix
Signal

My friends are already on telegram, I don't have to force change. I can make any chat more secure from the start. I am not using massive government level secrets anyhow. I mean, security is nice, but my cat photos, bad code, homegrown mint tea, and plans for the beach this coming summer are hardly a top secret problem anyway, I'm not planning a murder, I just don't want meta or facebook using them for advertising. Telegram is good enough.

Signal if I had to choose but there are plenty of other options
- Uhh like what?
  
  Matrix
  
  Session, Simplex chat and a bunch of other less functional ones

I would never trust telegram. The company behind it is mostly Russian scammers. I would use the opensource alternative to signal called Molly

I can generally convince people to use Telegram, but not signal. Telegram is better than SMS, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, SnapChat, etc so its what I use.
If anything, I've got hopes that Element/Matrix will get enough polish to become viable.

1.- jami 2.- xmpp + omemo 3.- matrix 4.- signal
It's hard no one cares. Where I live everyone uses whatsapp, and unfortunately what comes closer, and still without enough users base is signal on my list, and it's the last. Jami is distributed, which makes it best in class, and there are good efforts trying to make it not to steal the whole battery, as opposed to briar. I which more people were interested on not using centralized stuff, not even what has been called lately decentralized, which means centralized but with several central points (only if everyone self hosts it would be decentralized, which is not the case). Currently I use Jami and signal, though I've tried all those, plus briar, plus tox, even telegram...
- I've been using conversations with a friend for almost a year now, the only thing I find it lacking in is the reply feature, but other than that it works great!
  
  I think you are taking about reactions. Dino on the desktop already has them and they will come to conversations as well, if I am not mistaken.

One of those had an entire Ph.D thesis written on the topic of compromising the encryption used. The other did not. I use the latter.
- Which one is which? I'm out of the loop :(
  
  Telegram's the one that was broken as someone's Ph.D thesis. Signal wasn't.

SimpleX or Briar

First choice is always talk on SimpleX, second is Signal/Molly for something easier, there is no other app that I use.

Resource: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

Default Signal is better although Telegram has Secret Chat. I love thar Telegram let's you use a username to connect to others without exposing your mobile number to contacts.
But I have way more friends who actually use Telegram than Signal. No idea why although for many the massive community groups are used by a lot communities for staying in touch, as well as safety/security groups in communities.

I trust Signal more, but the main reason I use Signal is because a lot of people I know use it. I would personally love if Briar caught on more, but given that isn't really happening SimpleX is your best bet.
- Oh, and hopefully Veilid will catch on big

I prefer using telegram but in terms of privacy? Signal no discussions.

I got banned from Telegram so...
- that’s why I trust it

Threema
- me and my zero friends who use it
  
  well... no need to have a messanger if you haven't any friends.
- Like telegram, threema insists on making up their own 🤡-crypto constructions which (unsurprisingly) are not very good: https://breakingthe3ma.app/ (see also The Register's summary, and/or here for some earlier research).
  Their response to those findings was to reinvent and replace everything (again). It seems like a pretty safe bet that their new amateur cryptographic constructions will get broken too, just as soon as the next bored researcher gets around to looking closely at it.
  
  Right the formally proven threema crypto is going to get broken tomorrow /s https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/security-proof-ibex

Neither.
- You sound like a matrix user
  
  I am. You are too.

If the team behind Session could finally get their shit together I wouldn't use anything else.

Personally, Signal. But I don’t have much reason to back it up other than Telegram being Russian.
- Telegram is not Russian. The founder is a Russian - who left Russia about a decade ago after being pushed out of his local Facebook clone (VK) due to not complying with government requests. They nowadays mostly seem to be in Dubai, but as a legal entity hard to locate due to a cat and mouse game they're playing to avoid being reachable for authorities worldwide who want to enforce local laws.
  
  It's tragicomic how some people trust Telegram specifically because they perceive CEO Pavel Durov to be an enemy of the Russian government, while others trust Telegram because they think it is actually a Russian company and thus won't share data with western governments. (Durov talking about the facts that Signal has received millions from the US government's Radio Free Asia and sends all messages through Amazon servers helps with this second perception).
  I assume Durov's relationship status with various governments is it's complicated but also cordial. IMO it would be prudent to assume that intelligence and law enforcement agencies from lots of countries, including ones that are adversaries of each other, are all getting lots of data from Telegram both with and without the company's cooperation.
  There is literally no e2ee for most messages, and new devices can be added and authenticated by SMS, so, even the weakest of adversaries can play with it. Telegram really democratizes surveillance capabilities.
  
  Fair enough, thanks for the info
  
  But their main office in st Petersburg (russia) lol

Telegram

84 comments